Biomedical subjects

Esther Ruigendijk

Publications and source records attributed to Esther Ruigendijk.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Interpretation of pronouns in VP-ellipsis constructions in Dutch Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia.

In this paper, we investigate the ability of Dutch agrammatic Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics to assign reference to possessive pronouns in elided VP constructions. The assumption is that the comprehension problems in these two populations have different sources that are revealed in distinct patterns of responses. The focus is primarily on the performance of the agrammatic group whose errors in comprehension are not viewed as a consequence of a breakdown of grammatical knowledge but as a result of limited processing resources (for an overview see Grodzinsky, 2000). The results of the present study provide evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of the economy hierarchy as proposed in the Primitives of Binding (Reuland, 2001). According to the economy hierarchy proposed for the non-brain-damaged, the more economical semantic dependencies are preferred over the costlier discourse dependencies. This hierarchy is reflected in agrammatic aphasia where the semantic dependencies are available on time and preferred over the discourse dependences that are not available on time as a result of the lack of processing resources with consequences for comprehension.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Reference assignment: using language breakdown to choose between theoretical approaches.

We report results of an experimental study with Dutch agrammatic aphasics that investigated their ability to interpret pronominal elements in transitive clauses and Exceptional Case Marking constructions (ECM). Using the obtained experimental results as a tool, we distinguish between three competing linguistic theories that aim at determining principles responsible for pronoun distribution: Government and Binding (Chomsky, 1981), Reflexivity (Reinhart & Reuland, 1993), and Primitives of Binding (Reuland, 2001). The obtained results are inconsistent with Government and Binding, but consistent with the latter two theories. We further show that the Primitives of Binding framework most naturally explains our results. Our proposal is based on the different performance demonstrated by patients in transitive clauses and ECM constructions, in combination with the often-made claim in the literature regarding the limitation of processing resources in this population (e.g., Haarmann and Kolk, 1991, Haarmann and Kolk, 1994 and Zurif et al., 1993, among others).

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Gender and case in agrammatic production.

Omission and substitution of articles have often been mentioned as characteristics of agrammatic speech. In these descriptions, articles are considered to be so-called function words or closed-class words. These are supposed to be difficult for agrammatic speakers. From a linguistic point of view, the class of function words is far from homogeneous and even within the class of articles different linguistic properties can be distinguished. In many languages--Dutch, German, Italian and Portuguese are used as examples in this paper--the article is specified for gender. In German the article is specified for case as well. Gender and case differ from both a linguistic and a psycholinguistic point of view. Gender information is part of the word form. In some languages, gender can be derived from the word-form (as in Portuguese or Italian), while in other languages, the gender of nouns is stored as part of the word-form (as in Dutch and German). Case is a syntactic notion and relates to a dependency between the constituents in a sentence. Bearing in mind the fact that article production is impaired in agrammatic Broca's aphasia, one may wonder whether gender and/or case information plays a role here. For the present study, article production of nine Dutch and ten German individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia has been analyzed and the data show that most substitution errors concern case; the gender of the produced articles is usually correct. This supports the hypothesis that agrammatic speech is the consequence of an underlying deficit in syntactic processing.

Aphasia, Broca↗