The goal of the proposed studies is to investigate lexical-pragmatic influences on sentence processing in aphasic patients, with the eventual goal of developing a coherent model of sentence comprehension in aphasia that will provide a framework for the assessment and treatment of patients with disordered sentence comprehension.
The specific aims are: (1) To advance knowledge of how lexical-pragmatic information (e.g., verb subcategorization and plausibility) constrain sentence processing; and (2) To characterize changes in the function of such information associated with aphasia.
These aims will be addressed through studies of syntactic processing in which participants' on-line and off-line comprehension of garden path sentences will be examined under several conditions. This study will address the following hypotheses: (1) Relative to controls, aphasic patients will demonstrate reduced sensitivity to lexicalpragmatic information in measures of on-line sentence comprehension; and (2) Aphasic patients will benefit from lexical-pragmatic information in off-line measures of comprehension.
| DeDe, Gayle (2012) Lexical and prosodic effects on syntactic ambiguity resolution in aphasia. J Psycholinguist Res 41:387-408 |
| Dede, Gayle (2010) Utilization of prosodic information in syntactic ambiguity resolution. J Psycholinguist Res 39:345-74 |
