The efficacy of a linguistic-specific approach for treatment of sentence production deficits in agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients who evince difficulty with producing (and comprehending) """"""""complex"""""""" sentences -- sentences where noun phrases (NPs) have been moved out of their canonical positions is examined in this research. In consideration of aspects of theoretical linguistics (i.e., Government Binding theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1986)) and the linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic literature on sentence processing, this treatment was designed explicitly for training complex sentences by controlling linguistic properties known to underlie sentence formation and by emphasizing linguistic principles used across different sentence types. Exploiting the underlying linguistic representation of sentences, subjects will be trained to appreciate the thematic role assignments of sentential NPs and to operate the required movement to eventually derive surface forms of Wh questions, object clefts, and passive sentences (i.e., considering """"""""Move Alpha"""""""" rules -- either Wh- or Np-Movement (Chomsky, 1981)). In a series of experiments, single- subject experimental designs are utilized to study the relation among trained and untrained sentences while carefully controlling lexical and syntactic properties. The following experimental questions are posed: 1) Does treatment of particular Wh-movement structures (e.g., """"""""What"""""""" questions) result in generalized production of untrained structures relying on similar Wh-movement (e.g., """"""""Who"""""""" questions)?; 2) does treatment of sentences derived from Wh-movement (e.g., Wh-questions) generalize to untrained sentences (e.g., object clefts) that are very different in their surface realizations, yet are also derived from Wh-movement?; 3) does training structures derived from Wh-movement generalize to untrained structures derived from NP-movement, and vice versa?; 4) does generalization from more to less complex sentences relying on either Np- or Wh-movement result from this training (with complexity defined in terms of the number of NPs in the surface form of sentences and in terms of the inherent complexity of the verb's representation)?; 5) does treatment affect aspects of spontaneous discourse?; 6) does production treatment influence comprehension?; and (7) how does 'linguistic-specific' treatment compare with other treatments for sentence production deficits? This research will potentially result in new and efficacious treatment for aphasic individuals with sentence production deficits. If our hypotheses are correct concerning the need to consider the underlying representation of aberrantly produced sentences, then generalization across sentences relying on the same mechanisms but with different surface forms should be noted. Further, the extent to which learning and generalization patterns follow predictions made based on linguistic theory, will provide information concerning the value of such theories for predicting breakdown and recovery patterns in aphasia.
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