Sentence processing in the face of semantic loss: A case study

The modularity of the sentence processor, or lack thereof, remains a much-d ebated issue in psycholinguistics. The authors present evidence from a sema ntically impaired patient (DM) that bears on this issue. As demonstrated el sewhere (S. D. Breedin, E. M. Saffran, & H. B. Coslett, 1994), DM suffered a significant loss of semantic knowledge. Here, the authors show that this impairment did not compromise DM's ability to process syntactic information . DM performed well on grammaticality judgment tasks and on sentence compre hension tasks that required the use of syntactic information for the assign ment of thematic roles. The resistance of syntactic operations to semantic loss would seem to pose a challenge for models in which "the syntactic and conceptual aspects of processing are... inextricably intertwined" (J. L. Mc Clelland, M. St. John, & R. Taraban, 1989, p. 329).