The label “fluent aphasia” applies to different aphasic syndromes characterised by fluent speech with difficulties in lexical retrieval and/or grammatical processing. This study aims at investigating microlinguistic and macrolinguistic skills in persons with fluent aphasia. We hypothesised that their lexical and syntactic difficulties would affect also their narrative skills. Growing evidence shows that traditional tests may not be sensitive enough to capture the patterns of the linguistic impairments observed in these persons. Therefore, a narrative picture-description task was used to elicit linguistic samples. The narrative samples were analysed with a multilevel approach that allows clinicians to quantify the patient's productivity levels as well as their lexical, grammatical, and narrative skills. Results showed that the lexical impairment observed in the group of participants with fluent aphasia hampered the ability to produce well-formed sentences that, in turn, lowered the levels of cohesion of their narrative samples. Furthermore, the reduced levels of lexical informativeness were found correlated also to the production of errors of global coherence. The findings support the hypothesis that microlinguistic difficulties might affect macrolinguistic processing.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4025595
Can young infants decompose visual events into independent representations of objects and movements? Previous studies suggest that human infants may be born with the notion of objects but there is little evidence for movement representations during the first months of life. We devised a novel Rapid Visual Recognition Procedure to test whether the nervous system is innately disposed for the conceptual decomposition of visual events. We show that 4-month-old infants can spontaneously build object and movement representations and recognize these in partially matching test events. Also albino Swiss mice that were tested on a comparable procedure could spontaneously build detailed mental representations of moving objects. Our results dissociate the ability to conceptually decompose physical events into objects and spatio-temporal relations from various types of human and non-human specific experience, and suggest that the nervous system is genetically predisposed to anticipate the representation of objects and movements in both humans and non-human species.
COBISS.SI-ID: 56763234
This study investigates processing of interrogative filler-gap dependencies in which the filler integration site or gap is not directly subcategorized by the verb. This is the case when the wh-filler is a structural adjunct such as how or when rather than subject or object. Two self-paced reading experiments in English and Slovenian provide converging cross-linguistic evidence that wh-adjuncts elicit a kind of memory storage cost similar to that previously shown in the literature for wh-arguments. Experiment 1 investigates the storage costs elicited by the adjunct when in Slovenian, and Experiment 2 the storage costs elicited by how quicklyand why in English. The results support the class of theories of storage costs based on the metric in terms of incomplete phrase structure rules or incomplete syntactic head predictions. We also demonstrate that the endpoint of the storage cost for a wh-adjunct filler provides valuable processing evidence for its base structural position, the identification of which remains a rather murky issue in current grammatical research.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4007419
In this paper we report on the results of five experiments documenting the existence of three distinct grammars of conjunct agreement in Slovenian, found both within and across individuals: agreement with the highest conjunct, agreement with the closest conjunct, or agreement with the Boolean Phrase itself. We show that this variation is constrained and that some of these mechanisms can be blocked and/or forced depending on the properties of the conjuncts. Finally, we offer the suggestion that the presence of intraindividual variation arises because of ambiguous properties of the primary linguistic data.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3713531
In Slovenian, certain discourse particles can survive sluicing. This suggests Merchant’s (2001) “Sluicing-COMP generalization” does not hold in Slovenian. These discourse particles are neither operators nor are they DP internal, so they represent a counterexample to the Sluicing-COMP generalization. Given the parallel between discourse particles and non-wh-material in the Slovenian left periphery, we suggest that sluicing in Slovenian does not delete the entire left periphery.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4089595