Edgar Zurif - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Edgar Zurif
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Sep 1, 1979
We provide a threefold taxonomy of models in neurolinguistics: faculty models, which embrace the ... more We provide a threefold taxonomy of models in neurolinguistics: faculty models, which embrace the work of classical connectionists and holists and of such modern workers as Geschwind; process models, which are exemplified by the work of Luria, and which fractionate psycholinguistic tasks and ascribe the components to particular brain regions; and representational models, which use specific linguistic representations to build a psycholinguistic analysis of aphasic performance. We argue that further progress requires that neurolinguistics become more computational, using techniques from Artificial Intelligence to model the cooperative computation underlying language processing at a level of detail consonant with linguistic representations. Finally, we note that current neurolinguistics makes virtually no contact with the synapse-cell-circuit level of analysis characteristic of twentieth-century neuroscience. We suggest that the cooperative computation models we envisage provide the necessary intermediary between current neurolinguistic analysis and the utilization of the fruits of modern neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, and neurophysiology.
Attention Perception & Psychophysics, Sep 1, 1972
The Neuropsychology of Language
language processing. It relies largely on studies of language disorder arising from brain damage-... more language processing. It relies largely on studies of language disorder arising from brain damage-that is, on studies of aphasia. And within this research domain, we focus primarily on the fate of sentence comprehension. Recent findings suggest that linguistic inquiry and neuroscience most readily converge at the sentence level-that it is at this level that the relations between language structure, processing resources, and brain architecture are most apparent. The studies that illuminate these connections build on aspects of clinical descriptions first provided in the 1870s, at the start of the modern era of aphasia research. We begin by briefly reviewing these early descriptions and continue in a roughly chronological fashion, pointing out along the way some false starts and controversies.
Light Verbs in Korean and Hindi: The Locality Problem as an Epiphenomenon of the Surface Case Resolution
ABSTRACT
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1989
Previous research has found that agrammatic Broca aphasic patients have particular difficulty usi... more Previous research has found that agrammatic Broca aphasic patients have particular difficulty using determiners like "a" and "the" for the purposes of sentence comprehension. In this study, we test whether or not such difficulty extends to the level where lexical subcategories are distinguished by these articles. The absence or presence of a determiner distinguishes proper from common nouns (e.g., "ROSE vs. "A ROSE"), and mass from count nouns (e.g., "GLASS" vs. "A GLASS"). Groups of agrammatic Broca and fluent aphasic subjects were required to point to one of two pictures in response to a sentence such as "Point to the picture of rose" or "Point to the picture of a rose". Sentences were presented in either printed or spoken form. Results indicated that for the agrammatic Broca patients, printed presentation yielded significant improvement over spoken presentation only for the proper noun/common noun distinct...
The effects of focal brain damage on pragmatic expression
Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie, 1983
... Or do they extend beyond these two specific domains, implicating also pragmatic aspects of me... more ... Or do they extend beyond these two specific domains, implicating also pragmatic aspects of meaning ... study, we can conclude that they have some control over this particular pragmatic function. ... intended to instruct the patients to tell a story rather than simply label the depicted ...
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1999
This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coercion. We define aspectu... more This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coercion. We define aspectual coercion as a combinatorial semantic operation requiring computation over and above that provided by combining lexical items through expected syntactic processes. An experiment is described assessing whether or not parsing of a string requiring coercion—in addition to syntactic composition—is more computationally costly than parsing a syntactically
Agrammatism: Structural Deficits and Antecedent Processing Disruptions
Agrammatism, 1985
This chapter has three sections. The first provides an examination of the general notion that the... more This chapter has three sections. The first provides an examination of the general notion that the brain distinguishes among amodal linguistic components. The second section attempts to support a more specific claim: Namely, that from a linguistic perspective, agrammatism can best be reconstructed in syntactic terms. And the third section focuses upon processing disruptions in agrammatism-that is, upon the antecedents of the inability to represent structural information.
Neuropsychologia, 1978
A probe paradigm was used to assess memory for the surface structure of sentences in a group of a... more A probe paradigm was used to assess memory for the surface structure of sentences in a group of anterior (Broca's) and a group of posterior (Wernicke's) aphasics. Three types of sentences were used: active, passive and center-embedded sentences. Results showed that for both patient groups memory for function words was especially impaired relative to the patient's ability to recover content words. Further, both groups had marked difficulties in remembering center-embedded sentences. A second experiment rules out the possibility that this latter result was due to the extra syntactic complexity of the center-embedded sentences. Results from both experiments were interpreted as indicating that neither anterior nor posterior aphasics have normal surface structure memory representations and that the aphasic's memory span for sentence material may be severely limited.
Bee but not be: Oral reading of single words in aphasia and alexia
Neuropsychologia, 1975
... no appreciable aphasia. An attempt was made to differentiate experimentally between the readi... more ... no appreciable aphasia. An attempt was made to differentiate experimentally between the reading performances of patients diagnosed as having alexia with agraphia and those presenting with pure alexia. In these studies, the ...
Language and the Brain
Language, 2000
Preface 1. Neurolinguistics 2. The brain 3. How we know what we know about brain organization for... more Preface 1. Neurolinguistics 2. The brain 3. How we know what we know about brain organization for language 4. Aphasia: classification of the syndromes 5. Aphasia: what underlies the syndromes 6. Childhood aphasia and other language disorders 7. Right-brain-damage 8. Dementia 9. Disorders of the written word: dyslexia and dysgraphia 10. Bilingualism 11. Language organisation 12. The future of neurolinguistic study Glossary Notes and further reading Index.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1973
Cross-language studies have shown that Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a sufficient cue to separate ini... more Cross-language studies have shown that Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a sufficient cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study used VOT as a linguistic cue in examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Canadian French, unilingual Canadian English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was studied by having subjects label synthetically produced stop-vowel syllables while production was assessed through spectrographic measurements of VOT in word-initial stops. Six stop consonants, common to both languages, were used for these tasks. On the perception task, the two groups of unilingual subjects showed different perceptual crossovers with those of the bilinguals occupying an intermediate position. The production data indicate that VOT measures can separate voicing contrasts for speakers of Canadian English, but not for speakers of Canadian French. The data also show that language switc...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1973
Cross-language studies have shown that voice onset time (VOT) is a sufficient acoustic cue to sep... more Cross-language studies have shown that voice onset time (VOT) is a sufficient acoustic cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study is an attempt to investigate further the efficacy of VOT as a linguistic cue by examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Quebec French, unilingual Quebec English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was studied through a labeling procedure using synthetically produced stop+vowel syllables. Production was assessed through spectrographic measurements of VOT in word-initial stops. The six stop consonants of each language were investigated. The two groups of unilingual subjects had different perceptual functions and the bilinguals' responses were in an intermediate position. The production data indicate that VOT can separate between the English phonemic categories of /p,t,k/ and /b,d,g/, but this measure was not adequate for the Quebec French s...
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2009
I met Dave in 1983 in NY; at the time I was a doctoral student with Edgar Zurif. In 1995 I had th... more I met Dave in 1983 in NY; at the time I was a doctoral student with Edgar Zurif. In 1995 I had the opportunity to move to San Diego. There are many reasons to move, including hoping for a better scientific environment, making more money, trying to keep from getting stale, and then there are the personal reasons. One of those was because Dave lived in La Jolla. So, instead of discussing what Dave accomplished professionally and his remarkable influence on psycholinguistics and brain and language, I'm going to be selfish and take this short space to say what I miss: I miss comfortably playing off crazy theories; hearing Dave subtly tell me he's already run that experiment; traveling to far-off places just because we wanted to; tasting Tequilas; my wife and I going to dinner and plays (musicals!) with him and Emmanuelle, and savoring foie gras, good wines, and great chocolate in their home; using that blowgun from his porch; our 'coolest gadget' competitions; and hearing him tell Dave Barry jokes. Food, wine, gadgets, theories and experiments; they come and go. What I really miss are our daily conversations. Those can't be replaced.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1989
The effects of prior semantic context upon lexical access during sentence processing were examine... more The effects of prior semantic context upon lexical access during sentence processing were examined for three groups of subjects; nonfluent agrammatic (Broca's) aphasic patients; fluent (Wernicke's) aphasic patients; and neurologically intact control patients. Subjects were asked to comprehend auditorily presented, structurally simple sentences containing lexical ambiguities, which were in a context strongly biased toward just one interpretation of that ambiguity. While listening to each sentence, subjects also had to perform a lexical decision task upon a visually presented letter string. For the fluent Wernicke's patients, as for the controls, lexical decisions for visual words related to each of the meanings of the ambiguity were facilitated. By contrast, agrammatic Broca's patients showed significant facilitation only for visual words related to the a priori most frequent interpretation of the ambiguity. On the basis of these data, we suggest that normal form-base...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1996
Using a cross-modal lexical priming technique we provide an on-line examination of the ability of... more Using a cross-modal lexical priming technique we provide an on-line examination of the ability of aphasic patients to construct syntactically licensed dependencies in real time. We show a distinct difference between Wernicke's and Broca's aphasic patients with respect to this form of syntactic processing: the Wernicke's patients link the elements of dependency relations in the same manner as do neurologically intact individuals; the Broca's patients show no evidence of such linkage. These findings indicate that the cerebral tissue implicated in Wernicke's aphasia is not crucial for recovering syntactically licensed structural dependencies, while that implicated in Broca's aphasia is. Moreover, additional considerations suggest that the latter region is not the locus of syntactic representations per se, but rather provides the resources that sustain the normal operating characteristics of the lexical processing system—characteristics that are, in turn, necessa...
Brain and Language, 1976
q include patents ~ include citations a Create alert "language comprehension" About 190,000 resul... more q include patents ~ include citations a Create alert "language comprehension" About 190,000 results (0.04 sec) [BOOKJ The psychology of reading and language comprehension. MA Just, PA Carpenter -1987 -psycnet.apa .org Abstract 1. We have addressed this book to a wide range of readers: researchers in the psychology of reading and language, senior undergraduates and graduate students in psychology and education, teachers of read ing, and educators, in general. This book is I Cited by 1578 Related articles All 3 versions Cite Save More Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension MK Tanenhaus, MJ Spivey-Knowlton, KM Eberhard .. . -Science, 1995 -JSTOR Psycholinguists have commonly assumed that as a spoken linguistic message unfolds over time, it is initially structured by a syntactic processing module that is encapsulated from information provided by other perceptual and cognitive systems. To test the effects of Cited by 2221 Related articles All 35 versions Cite Save More Situation models in language comprehension and memory. RA Zwaan, GA Radvansky -Psychological bulletin, 1998 • psycnet.apa.org Abstract 1. This article reviews research on the use of situation models in language compreh ension and memory retrieval over the past 15 years. Situation models are integrated mental representations of a described state of affairs . Significant progress has Cited by 2117 Related articles All 21 versions Cite Save
The Existence of Comprehension Patterns in Broca's Aphasia
Brain and Language, 1999
Berndt and Caramazza (1999) claim that Grodzinsky, Piñango, Zurif, and Drai (1999) were able to s... more Berndt and Caramazza (1999) claim that Grodzinsky, Piñango, Zurif, and Drai (1999) were able to show a canonical-noncanonical difference (e.g., actives vs. passives) in the comprehension of Broca's aphasic patients only because of a patient selection bias. We show that the canonical-noncanonical comprehension pattern exists apart from any such bias, and that this pattern bears importantly on our understanding of the neuroanatomical organization of comprehension capacity at the sentence level.
Brain and Language, 1998
We present an on-line study showing different sources of lexical activation during sentence compr... more We present an on-line study showing different sources of lexical activation during sentence comprehension, distinguishing in this respect between reflexive syntactic and less temporarily constrained nonsyntactic sources. Specifically, we show that both the syntactic process of gap filling and a nonsyntactic end-of-sentence effect can be measurable in real time and can be temporally separated. The distinction between activation sources provides a new perspective on real-time sentence comprehension in aphasia and accounts for the disparate results reported in the literature.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Sep 1, 1979
We provide a threefold taxonomy of models in neurolinguistics: faculty models, which embrace the ... more We provide a threefold taxonomy of models in neurolinguistics: faculty models, which embrace the work of classical connectionists and holists and of such modern workers as Geschwind; process models, which are exemplified by the work of Luria, and which fractionate psycholinguistic tasks and ascribe the components to particular brain regions; and representational models, which use specific linguistic representations to build a psycholinguistic analysis of aphasic performance. We argue that further progress requires that neurolinguistics become more computational, using techniques from Artificial Intelligence to model the cooperative computation underlying language processing at a level of detail consonant with linguistic representations. Finally, we note that current neurolinguistics makes virtually no contact with the synapse-cell-circuit level of analysis characteristic of twentieth-century neuroscience. We suggest that the cooperative computation models we envisage provide the necessary intermediary between current neurolinguistic analysis and the utilization of the fruits of modern neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, and neurophysiology.
Attention Perception & Psychophysics, Sep 1, 1972
The Neuropsychology of Language
language processing. It relies largely on studies of language disorder arising from brain damage-... more language processing. It relies largely on studies of language disorder arising from brain damage-that is, on studies of aphasia. And within this research domain, we focus primarily on the fate of sentence comprehension. Recent findings suggest that linguistic inquiry and neuroscience most readily converge at the sentence level-that it is at this level that the relations between language structure, processing resources, and brain architecture are most apparent. The studies that illuminate these connections build on aspects of clinical descriptions first provided in the 1870s, at the start of the modern era of aphasia research. We begin by briefly reviewing these early descriptions and continue in a roughly chronological fashion, pointing out along the way some false starts and controversies.
Light Verbs in Korean and Hindi: The Locality Problem as an Epiphenomenon of the Surface Case Resolution
ABSTRACT
Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 1989
Previous research has found that agrammatic Broca aphasic patients have particular difficulty usi... more Previous research has found that agrammatic Broca aphasic patients have particular difficulty using determiners like "a" and "the" for the purposes of sentence comprehension. In this study, we test whether or not such difficulty extends to the level where lexical subcategories are distinguished by these articles. The absence or presence of a determiner distinguishes proper from common nouns (e.g., "ROSE vs. "A ROSE"), and mass from count nouns (e.g., "GLASS" vs. "A GLASS"). Groups of agrammatic Broca and fluent aphasic subjects were required to point to one of two pictures in response to a sentence such as "Point to the picture of rose" or "Point to the picture of a rose". Sentences were presented in either printed or spoken form. Results indicated that for the agrammatic Broca patients, printed presentation yielded significant improvement over spoken presentation only for the proper noun/common noun distinct...
The effects of focal brain damage on pragmatic expression
Canadian Journal of Psychology / Revue canadienne de psychologie, 1983
... Or do they extend beyond these two specific domains, implicating also pragmatic aspects of me... more ... Or do they extend beyond these two specific domains, implicating also pragmatic aspects of meaning ... study, we can conclude that they have some control over this particular pragmatic function. ... intended to instruct the patients to tell a story rather than simply label the depicted ...
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1999
This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coercion. We define aspectu... more This study reports results on the real-time consequences of aspectual coercion. We define aspectual coercion as a combinatorial semantic operation requiring computation over and above that provided by combining lexical items through expected syntactic processes. An experiment is described assessing whether or not parsing of a string requiring coercion—in addition to syntactic composition—is more computationally costly than parsing a syntactically
Agrammatism: Structural Deficits and Antecedent Processing Disruptions
Agrammatism, 1985
This chapter has three sections. The first provides an examination of the general notion that the... more This chapter has three sections. The first provides an examination of the general notion that the brain distinguishes among amodal linguistic components. The second section attempts to support a more specific claim: Namely, that from a linguistic perspective, agrammatism can best be reconstructed in syntactic terms. And the third section focuses upon processing disruptions in agrammatism-that is, upon the antecedents of the inability to represent structural information.
Neuropsychologia, 1978
A probe paradigm was used to assess memory for the surface structure of sentences in a group of a... more A probe paradigm was used to assess memory for the surface structure of sentences in a group of anterior (Broca's) and a group of posterior (Wernicke's) aphasics. Three types of sentences were used: active, passive and center-embedded sentences. Results showed that for both patient groups memory for function words was especially impaired relative to the patient's ability to recover content words. Further, both groups had marked difficulties in remembering center-embedded sentences. A second experiment rules out the possibility that this latter result was due to the extra syntactic complexity of the center-embedded sentences. Results from both experiments were interpreted as indicating that neither anterior nor posterior aphasics have normal surface structure memory representations and that the aphasic's memory span for sentence material may be severely limited.
Bee but not be: Oral reading of single words in aphasia and alexia
Neuropsychologia, 1975
... no appreciable aphasia. An attempt was made to differentiate experimentally between the readi... more ... no appreciable aphasia. An attempt was made to differentiate experimentally between the reading performances of patients diagnosed as having alexia with agraphia and those presenting with pure alexia. In these studies, the ...
Language and the Brain
Language, 2000
Preface 1. Neurolinguistics 2. The brain 3. How we know what we know about brain organization for... more Preface 1. Neurolinguistics 2. The brain 3. How we know what we know about brain organization for language 4. Aphasia: classification of the syndromes 5. Aphasia: what underlies the syndromes 6. Childhood aphasia and other language disorders 7. Right-brain-damage 8. Dementia 9. Disorders of the written word: dyslexia and dysgraphia 10. Bilingualism 11. Language organisation 12. The future of neurolinguistic study Glossary Notes and further reading Index.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1973
Cross-language studies have shown that Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a sufficient cue to separate ini... more Cross-language studies have shown that Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a sufficient cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study used VOT as a linguistic cue in examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Canadian French, unilingual Canadian English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was studied by having subjects label synthetically produced stop-vowel syllables while production was assessed through spectrographic measurements of VOT in word-initial stops. Six stop consonants, common to both languages, were used for these tasks. On the perception task, the two groups of unilingual subjects showed different perceptual crossovers with those of the bilinguals occupying an intermediate position. The production data indicate that VOT measures can separate voicing contrasts for speakers of Canadian English, but not for speakers of Canadian French. The data also show that language switc...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1973
Cross-language studies have shown that voice onset time (VOT) is a sufficient acoustic cue to sep... more Cross-language studies have shown that voice onset time (VOT) is a sufficient acoustic cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study is an attempt to investigate further the efficacy of VOT as a linguistic cue by examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Quebec French, unilingual Quebec English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was studied through a labeling procedure using synthetically produced stop+vowel syllables. Production was assessed through spectrographic measurements of VOT in word-initial stops. The six stop consonants of each language were investigated. The two groups of unilingual subjects had different perceptual functions and the bilinguals' responses were in an intermediate position. The production data indicate that VOT can separate between the English phonemic categories of /p,t,k/ and /b,d,g/, but this measure was not adequate for the Quebec French s...
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 2009
I met Dave in 1983 in NY; at the time I was a doctoral student with Edgar Zurif. In 1995 I had th... more I met Dave in 1983 in NY; at the time I was a doctoral student with Edgar Zurif. In 1995 I had the opportunity to move to San Diego. There are many reasons to move, including hoping for a better scientific environment, making more money, trying to keep from getting stale, and then there are the personal reasons. One of those was because Dave lived in La Jolla. So, instead of discussing what Dave accomplished professionally and his remarkable influence on psycholinguistics and brain and language, I'm going to be selfish and take this short space to say what I miss: I miss comfortably playing off crazy theories; hearing Dave subtly tell me he's already run that experiment; traveling to far-off places just because we wanted to; tasting Tequilas; my wife and I going to dinner and plays (musicals!) with him and Emmanuelle, and savoring foie gras, good wines, and great chocolate in their home; using that blowgun from his porch; our 'coolest gadget' competitions; and hearing him tell Dave Barry jokes. Food, wine, gadgets, theories and experiments; they come and go. What I really miss are our daily conversations. Those can't be replaced.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1989
The effects of prior semantic context upon lexical access during sentence processing were examine... more The effects of prior semantic context upon lexical access during sentence processing were examined for three groups of subjects; nonfluent agrammatic (Broca's) aphasic patients; fluent (Wernicke's) aphasic patients; and neurologically intact control patients. Subjects were asked to comprehend auditorily presented, structurally simple sentences containing lexical ambiguities, which were in a context strongly biased toward just one interpretation of that ambiguity. While listening to each sentence, subjects also had to perform a lexical decision task upon a visually presented letter string. For the fluent Wernicke's patients, as for the controls, lexical decisions for visual words related to each of the meanings of the ambiguity were facilitated. By contrast, agrammatic Broca's patients showed significant facilitation only for visual words related to the a priori most frequent interpretation of the ambiguity. On the basis of these data, we suggest that normal form-base...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1996
Using a cross-modal lexical priming technique we provide an on-line examination of the ability of... more Using a cross-modal lexical priming technique we provide an on-line examination of the ability of aphasic patients to construct syntactically licensed dependencies in real time. We show a distinct difference between Wernicke's and Broca's aphasic patients with respect to this form of syntactic processing: the Wernicke's patients link the elements of dependency relations in the same manner as do neurologically intact individuals; the Broca's patients show no evidence of such linkage. These findings indicate that the cerebral tissue implicated in Wernicke's aphasia is not crucial for recovering syntactically licensed structural dependencies, while that implicated in Broca's aphasia is. Moreover, additional considerations suggest that the latter region is not the locus of syntactic representations per se, but rather provides the resources that sustain the normal operating characteristics of the lexical processing system—characteristics that are, in turn, necessa...
Brain and Language, 1976
q include patents ~ include citations a Create alert "language comprehension" About 190,000 resul... more q include patents ~ include citations a Create alert "language comprehension" About 190,000 results (0.04 sec) [BOOKJ The psychology of reading and language comprehension. MA Just, PA Carpenter -1987 -psycnet.apa .org Abstract 1. We have addressed this book to a wide range of readers: researchers in the psychology of reading and language, senior undergraduates and graduate students in psychology and education, teachers of read ing, and educators, in general. This book is I Cited by 1578 Related articles All 3 versions Cite Save More Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension MK Tanenhaus, MJ Spivey-Knowlton, KM Eberhard .. . -Science, 1995 -JSTOR Psycholinguists have commonly assumed that as a spoken linguistic message unfolds over time, it is initially structured by a syntactic processing module that is encapsulated from information provided by other perceptual and cognitive systems. To test the effects of Cited by 2221 Related articles All 35 versions Cite Save More Situation models in language comprehension and memory. RA Zwaan, GA Radvansky -Psychological bulletin, 1998 • psycnet.apa.org Abstract 1. This article reviews research on the use of situation models in language compreh ension and memory retrieval over the past 15 years. Situation models are integrated mental representations of a described state of affairs . Significant progress has Cited by 2117 Related articles All 21 versions Cite Save
The Existence of Comprehension Patterns in Broca's Aphasia
Brain and Language, 1999
Berndt and Caramazza (1999) claim that Grodzinsky, Piñango, Zurif, and Drai (1999) were able to s... more Berndt and Caramazza (1999) claim that Grodzinsky, Piñango, Zurif, and Drai (1999) were able to show a canonical-noncanonical difference (e.g., actives vs. passives) in the comprehension of Broca's aphasic patients only because of a patient selection bias. We show that the canonical-noncanonical comprehension pattern exists apart from any such bias, and that this pattern bears importantly on our understanding of the neuroanatomical organization of comprehension capacity at the sentence level.
Brain and Language, 1998
We present an on-line study showing different sources of lexical activation during sentence compr... more We present an on-line study showing different sources of lexical activation during sentence comprehension, distinguishing in this respect between reflexive syntactic and less temporarily constrained nonsyntactic sources. Specifically, we show that both the syntactic process of gap filling and a nonsyntactic end-of-sentence effect can be measurable in real time and can be temporally separated. The distinction between activation sources provides a new perspective on real-time sentence comprehension in aphasia and accounts for the disparate results reported in the literature.