Journal
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
Volume 96, Issue 2, Pages 117-128Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.bandl.2004.10.016
Keywords
aphasia; variability; syntax; quantitative analysis; confidence interval; beta-distribution
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Behavioral variation in Broca's aphasia has been characterized as boundless, calling into question the validity of the syndrome-based schema and related diagnostic methods of acquired language disorders. More generally, this putative variability has cast serious doubts on the feasibility of localizing linguistic operations in cortex. We present a new approach to the quantitative analysis of deficient linguistic performance, and apply it to a large data set, constructed from the published literature: Comprehension data of 69 carefully selected Broca's aphasic patients, tested on nearly 6000 stimulus sentences, were partitioned in different ways, and subjected to a series of analyses. While a certain amount of variability is indeed evident in the data, our quantitative analyses reveal a highly robust selective impairment pattern for the group: the patients' ability to analyze syntactic movement is severely compromised, in line with the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis. Further analyses suggest that patients' performance on no-movement sentence types exhibits less variation than on sentences that contain movement. We discuss the clinical and theoretical implications of our results. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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