judit druks - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by judit druks

Contemporary and Emergent Theories of Agrammatism, 2016

The book includes chapters on impairments to grammatical morphemes the tree pruning and trace del... more The book includes chapters on impairments to grammatical morphemes the tree pruning and trace deletion hypotheses verb deficits in sentences, and as single words generalized minimality adaptation theory and slow syntax the involvement of ...

Journal of Neurolinguistics, 2003

Research on sentence comprehension in aphasia has shown that individuals with agrammatic Broca’s ... more Research on sentence comprehension in aphasia has shown that individuals with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia often exhibit a highly selective deficit in processing intra-sentential dependencies; comprehension of sentences that contain fillergap dependencies (i.e. A’-Movement) is impaired, whereas comprehension of sentences that contain Binding relations are relatively spared. This dissociation has been attributed to the fact that there are important syntactic and processing differences between the two dependencies (Santi & Grodzinsky, 2007a, 2012). Syntactically, the antecedent of a reflexive (John in (1a) is in a theta position, whereas in A’-Movement, the displaced filler (the man, that, in (1b)) is not.

Journal of Neurolinguistics, 2016

People with aphasia (PWA) often fail to understand syntactically complex sentences. This phenomen... more People with aphasia (PWA) often fail to understand syntactically complex sentences. This phenomenon has been described as asyntactic comprehension and has been explored in various studies cross-linguistically in the past decades. However, until now there has been no consensus among researchers as to the nature of sentence comprehension failures in aphasia. Impaired representations accounts ascribe comprehension deficits to loss of syntactic knowledge, whereas processing/ resource reduction accounts assume that PWA are unable to use syntactic knowledge in comprehension due to resource limitation resulting from the brain damage. The aim of this paper is to use independently motivated psycholinguistic models of sentence processing to test a variant of the processing/ resource reduction accounts that we dub the Complexity Threshold Hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, PWA are capable of building well-formed syntactic representations, but, because their resources for language processing are limited, their syntactic parser fails when processing complexity exceeds a certain threshold. The source of complexity investigated in the experiments reported in this paper is syntactic prediction. We conducted two experiments involving comprehension of sentences with different types of syntactic dependencies, namely dependencies that do not require syntactic prediction (i.e. unpredictable dependencies in sentences that require Quantifier Raising) and

Linguistische Berichte, 2000

Behav Neurol 25 185 191, Mar 19, 2012

We report a patient with non-fluent Primary Progressive Aphasia who was premorbidly literate in t... more We report a patient with non-fluent Primary Progressive Aphasia who was premorbidly literate in two alphabetic scripts, Hungarian (L1) and English (L2). Testing was performed over a two-year period to assess the impact of progressive illness on oral reading and repetition of single words. Results showed significant decline in oral reading in both languages, and an effect of language status in favour of oral reading in L1. Phonological complexity was a significant predictor of oral reading decline in both languages. Of interest, we observed an effect of language status on task performance whereby repetition was better in L2 than L1 but oral reading was better in L1 than L2. We conclude that language status has an effect on repetition and oral reading abilities for bilingual speakers with non-fluent Primary Progressive Aphasia.

Brain Lang 87 11 12, Oct 1, 2003

The case of an aphasic patient whose spontaneous speech contains very few lexical verbs is report... more The case of an aphasic patient whose spontaneous speech contains very few lexical verbs is reported. Instead of sentences with lexical verbs, the patient produces many (grammatical) copular constructions. He also substitutes lexical verbs with the copula. Although this results in ungrammatical utterances, by doing so, a resemblance of sentence structure and a degree of grammaticality of his utterances are preserved. Although the patient is more impaired in naming action than object pictures, it is unlikely that lexical retrieval diYculties are solely responsible for the paucity of lexical verbs in his speech. A series of tests revealed a profound deWcit in producing tense marking inXections and in understanding their signiWcance. We argue that the unavailability of tense features is the primary reason for the lack of lexical verbs in his speech. An alternative possibility, that the tense deWcit interacts with the verb retrieval deWcit, is also discussed. The patient has a complex lesion and language proWle, with features associated with both Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. However, since the study focuses on his verb and tense deWcits and the grammaticality of his utterances, issues that are often discussed in relation to agrammatic Broca's aphasia, the literature that is relevant to these topics and to Broca's aphasia is reviewed, despite the diVerent diagnostic proWle of the patient. 

Aphasiology 20 993 1017, Sep 1, 2006

Background: The background to the study is the debate in relation to the English regular/irregula... more Background: The background to the study is the debate in relation to the English regular/irregular past tense forms. Aims: The purpose of the investigation was the evaluation of the dual mechanism (DMT: Pinker, 1999; Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1997, 1998; Ullman, Corkin, Coppola, Hickok, Growdon, Koroshetz, et al., 1997) and connectionist single mechanism models (SMT: Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, &

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 02643299108253380, Aug 16, 2007

ABSTRACT

Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 02687030802235195, Sep 30, 2010

To cite this Article Robinson, Sheila, Druks, Judit, Hodges, John and Garrard, Peter(2008)'The tr... more To cite this Article Robinson, Sheila, Druks, Judit, Hodges, John and Garrard, Peter(2008)'The treatment of object naming, definition, and object use in semantic dementia: The effectiveness of errorless learning',Aphasiology,23:6,749 -775

Brain Lang, 2000

Zurif and Piñango (1999) claimed that they excluded the four agrammatic patients reported by Druk... more Zurif and Piñango (1999) claimed that they excluded the four agrammatic patients reported by Druks and Marshall (1991) from their review article because two of the patients were nonnative speakers of Hebrew and because the Hebrew sentences we used in our investigations were ungrammatical. In Druks and Marshall (1991) we have shown that the presence or the absence of a trace in two types of Hebrew passives had no effect on the patients' performance. Two patients, without comprehension deficits, performed equally well on both types of passives and two patients, with comprehension deficits, were equally impaired on both types. We remind Zurif and Piñango of our previous response to the claims of ungrammaticality of our materials (Druks & Marshall, 1992) and argue that there were no justifiable reasons for excluding these cases from the review. We also comment on Zurif and Piñango's (1999) and Grodzinsky's (2000) new proposal that the association of agrammatic comprehension should be with Broca's aphasia and not with agrammatism.

Cognitive Neuropsychology 30 578 596, Dec 1, 2013

The convergence hypothesis [Green, D. W. (2003). The neural basis of the lexicon and the grammar ... more The convergence hypothesis [Green, D. W. (2003). The neural basis of the lexicon and the grammar in L2 acquisition: The convergence hypothesis. In R. van Hout, A. Hulk, F. Kuiken, &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; R. Towell (Eds.), The interface between syntax and the lexicon in second language acquisition (pp. 197-218). Amsterdam: John Benjamins] assumes that the neural substrates of language representations are shared between the languages of a bilingual speaker. One prediction of this hypothesis is that neurodegenerative disease should produce parallel deterioration to lexical and grammatical processing in bilingual aphasia. We tested this prediction with a late bilingual Hungarian (first language, L1)-English (second language, L2) speaker J.B. who had nonfluent progressive aphasia (NFPA). J.B. had acquired L2 in adolescence but was premorbidly proficient and used English as his dominant language throughout adult life. Our investigations showed comparable deterioration to lexical and grammatical knowledge in both languages during a one-year period. Parallel deterioration to language processing in a bilingual speaker with NFPA challenges the assumption that L1 and L2 rely on different brain mechanisms as assumed in some theories of bilingual language processing [Ullman, M. T. (2001). The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in ﬁrst and second language: The declarative/procedural model. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 4(1), 105-122].