Biomedical subjects

P Gorrell

Publications and source records attributed to P Gorrell.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1998

Structural prominence and agrammatic theta-role assignment: a reconsideration of linear strategies.

In this paper we examine the tendency for agrammatic aphasics to make thematic reversal errors in comprehension, e.g., a tendency for English-speaking agrammatics to assign a preposed object the subject role. Although this tendency has been argued to follow from either a linear (Grodzinsky, 1995) or a directionality (Hagiwara & Caplan, 1990) strategy, we show that such proposals can, at best, function as language-particular strategies. We examine data from English, Japanese, German and Dutch, and propose a Structural Prominence Hypothesis which captures the following cross-linguistic generalization: thematic reversal errors result from a tendency to assign thematic roles based on the relative structural prominence of the candidate NPs.

Aphasia, Broca↗

PubMed1996

Parsing theory and phrase-order variation in German V2 clauses.

This paper examines the syntactic processing of structural ambiguities in Germany verb-second (V2) clauses. It is argued that the proposal of Grimshaw (1991, 1993) that CP and IP are verbal "extended projections" allows an incremental parse of these ambiguities which is consistent with the principles of simplicity (no vacuous structure building) and structural determinism (computed dominance and precedence relations cannot be altered by parser-internal operations) proposed in Gorrell (1995). It is argued that the ambiguities discussed here provide evidence against the hypothesis that the parser's initial attachment decisions follow from a maximal-licensing principle rather than a preference for minimal structure (Pritchett, 1992). Further, it is argued that, contra Fodor and Inoue (1994), theories of syntactic processing must not only incorporate some mechanism for resolving conflicts between new input and computed structure, but also distinguish the comparative costs of different reanalysis types.

Cognition↗

PubMed1989

Contextual information and temporal terms.

We report an experiment designed to identify how contextual information can influence children's performance on an experimental task involving temporal terms. Crain (1982) reported improved performance on a comprehension task when subjects were provided with contextual information, and he suggested that the improvement was due to satisfaction of presuppositions. However, this contextual information might have served to simplify task demands by providing prior information concerning an important aspect of the task. The present study distinguishes these factors by incorporating contextual information into the subordinate clause of the test sentences in a comprehension experiment (to satisfy presupposions) or into the main clause (to provide comparable prior information without satisfying presuppositions). We conclude that contextual information results in a significant improvement only when such information can be used to satisfy presuppositions.

Child Language↗