JUDGMENTS OF SEMANTIC ANOMALY IN AGRAMMATIC PATIENTS - ARGUMENT MOVEMENT, SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY, AND THE USE OF HEURISTICS

Two studies on the judgment of semantic anomaly of sentences in agramm atic aphasia are reported. The primary question was whether performanc e on this task would be negatively affected by sentence complexity, In a first experiment, we repeated part of the study by Schwartz, Lineba rger, Saffran, and Fate (Language and Cognitive Processing, 2, 85-113, 1987), With a group of 15 Dutch-speaking agrammatics, we obtained a s mall but significant negative effect of ''lexical padding'': sentences like ''#the puppy ran around excitedly and accidently dropped the lit tle boy onto the wet grass which upset Louise'' elicited more errors t han their simple counterparts, ''#the puppy dropped the little boy.'' In our second study, we looked at (a) the effect of sentence embedding (e.g,, ''the doctor, who was tired of climbing a staircase, examined the patient'') and (b) the effect of incorporating a ''distracter agen t'' in the sentences, that is, an NP that could serve as a possible ag ent of the critical action (e.g., ''the doctor, who had talked to the nurse, examined the patient''). In additon we employed sentences with moved arguments (e.g., ''it was the patient who the doctor examined'') . There were two major conclusions. First, syntactic complexity has a strong negative effect on anomaly judgments. Second, patient use a Lin ear-order strategy to deal with the task. Results are discussed in ter ms of a range of recent approaches to agrammatic comprehension, not on ly representational hypotheses, based upon linguistic theory, but also processing accounts. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.