Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience Theoretical and Empirical Studies on Language Disorders - Hillert, Dieter (VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1994)
In our psycholinguistic investigations we have found that lexical properties, including abstract thematic information, are accessed with the verb during on-line sentence processing. We have also found that antecedents to traces are re-accessed at lexically-unfilled trace positions, and that traces are located, perhaps, by the acoustic information that underlies the prosodic contour of the sentence. We now tum to some of our work in neurolinguistics which exploits the linguistic and psycholinguistic facts we have just presented. 3 Sentence Comprehension in Neurologically-impaired Populations Our work in this area has sought to explain the performance of brain-damaged subjects by making reference to linguistic theory and to normal sentence processing routines, with the goal of ultimately shedding light on the normal operation of the sentence processing system. 3. 1 Accessing thematic information in aphasia As we have shown earlier, there's quite a bit of evidence suggesting that verbs have a lot to do with both the syntactic and semantic characteristics of a sentence. As an example consider that when we acquire the verb discover, we likely gain the real-world fact that discover requires two arguments - both a "discoverer" and something that is "discovered". The "something that is discovered", however, can take several forms that display different syntactic and semantic characteristics