The on-line processing of unaccusativity in Greek agrammatism

Peristeri, E., Tsimpli, I.-M. and Tsapkini, K. (2013) The on-line processing of unaccusativity in Greek agrammatism. Applied Psycholinguistics, 34 (2). pp. 233-276. ISSN 1469-1817 doi: 10.1017/S0142716411000683

Abstract/Summary

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation of the verb’s syntactically defined antecedent provided in the early part of the sentence. Our results demonstrate that the Broca group showed selective reactivation of the antecedent for the unaccusatives. We consider several interpretations for our data, including explanations focusing on the transitivization properties of nonactive and active voice-alternating unaccusatives, the costly procedure claimed to underlie the parsing of active nonvoice-alternating unaccusatives, and the animacy of the antecedent modulating the syntactic choices of the patients.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/31233
Identification Number/DOI	10.1017/S0142716411000683
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	No Reading authors. Back catalogue items
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
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