Production of Arguments and Adjuncts in Normal and Agrammatic speakers: An Eyetracking study

Lee, Jiyeon and Thompson, Cynthia (2008) Production of Arguments and Adjuncts in Normal and Agrammatic speakers: An Eyetracking study. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Agrammatic Broca’s aphasic speakers often are impaired in producing verbs and sentences with complex argument structure. In addition, deficits in production of adjunct phrases has been noted (Caplan, unpublished; Thompson et al.,1997). Based on models of normal sentence production, the former deficits have been attributed to problems at both the positional and functional level. However, these models do not address the latter. This study examined real-time production of adjuncts vs. arguments, by tracking eye movements in 13 young control and 9 agrammatic speakers. Controls showed greater difficulty for adjuncts than for arguments during production of the verb predicate structure. However, aphasic speakers showed differences prior to speech onset, suggesting an impairment in computing thematic-to-grammatical (functional) relationships between sentence constituents.

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