Aphasia & Syntax (book chapter)
William Matchin, Corianne Rogalsky
November 2017 

In this chapter we will first outline the methods of research in aphasia and how they have been applied to syntax. Following this, we will review the history of the interaction of these two fields, particularly with respect to the putative syndrome of “agrammatism” that is most relevant to syntactic theory. We will make key observations about the successes and failures of this research. In light of these failures, we propose splitting agrammatism into at least two separate syndromes: one that is tied to deficits in domain-general verbal working memory resources, and another that is tied to a content-addressable memory (CAM) retrieval system operating over syntactic features (McElree et al., 2003; Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). This distinction allows us to capture aspects of agrammatism that appear to be domain-general as well as those that appear to be specific to language. We then suggest some helpful steps to reconnect syntactic theory to the study of aphasia.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003753 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Handbook of Experimental Syntax (Oxford University Press; Jon Sprouse, editor)
keywords:	aphasia, agrammatism, broca's area, syntactic theory, government and binding, working memory, syntax
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