Grodzinsky's Tree-Pruning Hypothesis can be extended to explain agrammat... more Grodzinsky's Tree-Pruning Hypothesis can be extended to explain agrammatic comprehension disorders. Although agrammatism is evidence for syntactic modularity, there is no evidence for its anatomical modularity or for its localization in the frontal lobe. Agrammatism results ...
... Tali risultati sono in linea con quanto già evidenziato in ambito afasiologico13. ... Cogniti... more ... Tali risultati sono in linea con quanto già evidenziato in ambito afasiologico13. ... Cognitive Neuropsychology, 1985;2:253-64. 3. Friedmann N, Nachman-Katz I. Developmental neglect dyslexia in a Hebrew-reading child. Cortex, 2004;40:301-13. ...
The dual-route models of action distinguish between a semantic and a non-semantic visuo-motor rou... more The dual-route models of action distinguish between a semantic and a non-semantic visuo-motor route to execute different types of gestures. Despite the large amount of evidence in support to the model, some aspects are debated. One issue concerns the recruitment of the visuo-motor route to correctly execute meaningful gestures when the semantic route is damaged. Debated predictions of the dual-route model were investigated in a sample of 32 patients with left hemisphere stroke lesions compared to 27 healthy controls. Group analysis showed that patients were equally impaired on meaningful and meaningless gestures. Single-case analysis demonstrated that most cases were more impaired on meaningful than on meaningless gestures both when they are given in separate lists and when they are intermingled. Impaired performance on the imitation of meaningful gestures in both the separate and mixed list but spared performance on meaningless gestures in the separate list is against the hypothesis that the intact visuo-motor route compensates for damage to the semantic route. These results suggest that the damaged semantic route interferes with the visuo-motor route and prevents the processing of meaningful gestures along the visuo-motor route. Furthermore, an explorative analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between gestures imitation and pantomime of object use on verbal command and between gestures imitation and performance on linguistic tasks. Although no significant correlation emerged, patients with moderate/severe impairment on the AAT performed significantly worse on meaningful, but not on meaningless gestures than patients with mild/minimal language impairment, suggesting that praxis and language systems are independent but dynamically interact.
This paper reports the case of a patient, M.P., who developed delusion of inanimate doubles, with... more This paper reports the case of a patient, M.P., who developed delusion of inanimate doubles, without Capgras syndrome, after traumatic brain injury. His delusional symptoms were studied longitudinally and the cognitive impairments associated with delusion were investigated. Data suggest that M.P. did 'perceive' the actual differences between doubles and originals rather than 'confabulate' them. The cognitive profile, characterized by retrograde episodic amnesia, but neither object processing impairment nor confabulations, supports this hypothesis. The study examines the nature of object misidentification based on Ellis' and Staton's account and proposes a new account based on concurrent unbiased retrieval of semantic memory traces and biased recollection of episodic memory traces.
The present study employs neglect dyslexia (ND) as an experimental model to study compound-word p... more The present study employs neglect dyslexia (ND) as an experimental model to study compound-word processing; in particular, it investigates whether compound constituents are hierarchically organized at mental level and addresses the possibility of whole-word representation. Seven Italian-speaking patients suffering from ND participated in a word naming task. Both left-headed (pescespada, swordfish) and right-headed (astronave, spaceship) Italian compound nouns were used as stimuli. Non-existent compounds, which were generated by substituting the leftmost constituent of a compound with an orthographically similar word (e.g., *pestespada, *plaguesword), were also employed. A significant headedness effect emerged in the group analysis: patients read left-headed compounds better than right-headed compounds. A significant lexicality effect was also found: the participants read real compounds better than their non-existent compound pairs. Moreover, logit mixed-effects analyses indicated a left-hand constituent frequency effect. Results are discussed in terms of hierarchical representation of compounds and direct access to compound lemma nodes.
It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-... more It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of both the compound and its constituents should play a role when performing tasks involving compound processing, e.g., compound-word reading. This issue is investigated in the present study through an assessment of the performance of a deep dyslexic patient (GR) in three compound-reading experiments. In the first experiment, verb-noun (VN) compound nouns (e.g., lavapiatti, "dishwasher", lit. wash-dishes) were employed as stimuli, while in the second, VN compound stimuli were embedded in sentences, and were compared to paired verb phrases (e.g., lui lava piatti, "he washes dishes"). Position-specific effects were ruled out by means of a third experiment, which investigated the retrieval of noun-noun compounds (e.g., pescespada, "swordfish", lit. fishsword). In experiment 1, GR made errors on the verb constituent more frequently than on the noun, an effect that did not emerge in Experiment 2: when embedded in sentences, VN compounds were read significantly better than verb-phrases and no grammatical-class effect emerged. In Experiment 3, the first and the second constituent were read with the same level of accuracy. The disproportionate impairment, which emerged in reading the verb component of nominal VN compounds, indicates that the grammatical properties of constituents are being retrieved, and thus confirms access to the constituent lemma-nodes. However, the results suggested a whole-word representation when compounds are embedded in sentences; since the sentence context affects the access to compounds through syntactic constraints, whole-word representation is arguably at the lemma level as well (multiple-lemma representation). Experiment 3 indicates that these effects cannot be accounted for by a position-specific impairment.
Grodzinsky's Tree-Pruning Hypothesis can be extended to explain agrammat... more Grodzinsky's Tree-Pruning Hypothesis can be extended to explain agrammatic comprehension disorders. Although agrammatism is evidence for syntactic modularity, there is no evidence for its anatomical modularity or for its localization in the frontal lobe. Agrammatism results ...
... Tali risultati sono in linea con quanto già evidenziato in ambito afasiologico13. ... Cogniti... more ... Tali risultati sono in linea con quanto già evidenziato in ambito afasiologico13. ... Cognitive Neuropsychology, 1985;2:253-64. 3. Friedmann N, Nachman-Katz I. Developmental neglect dyslexia in a Hebrew-reading child. Cortex, 2004;40:301-13. ...
The dual-route models of action distinguish between a semantic and a non-semantic visuo-motor rou... more The dual-route models of action distinguish between a semantic and a non-semantic visuo-motor route to execute different types of gestures. Despite the large amount of evidence in support to the model, some aspects are debated. One issue concerns the recruitment of the visuo-motor route to correctly execute meaningful gestures when the semantic route is damaged. Debated predictions of the dual-route model were investigated in a sample of 32 patients with left hemisphere stroke lesions compared to 27 healthy controls. Group analysis showed that patients were equally impaired on meaningful and meaningless gestures. Single-case analysis demonstrated that most cases were more impaired on meaningful than on meaningless gestures both when they are given in separate lists and when they are intermingled. Impaired performance on the imitation of meaningful gestures in both the separate and mixed list but spared performance on meaningless gestures in the separate list is against the hypothesis that the intact visuo-motor route compensates for damage to the semantic route. These results suggest that the damaged semantic route interferes with the visuo-motor route and prevents the processing of meaningful gestures along the visuo-motor route. Furthermore, an explorative analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between gestures imitation and pantomime of object use on verbal command and between gestures imitation and performance on linguistic tasks. Although no significant correlation emerged, patients with moderate/severe impairment on the AAT performed significantly worse on meaningful, but not on meaningless gestures than patients with mild/minimal language impairment, suggesting that praxis and language systems are independent but dynamically interact.
This paper reports the case of a patient, M.P., who developed delusion of inanimate doubles, with... more This paper reports the case of a patient, M.P., who developed delusion of inanimate doubles, without Capgras syndrome, after traumatic brain injury. His delusional symptoms were studied longitudinally and the cognitive impairments associated with delusion were investigated. Data suggest that M.P. did 'perceive' the actual differences between doubles and originals rather than 'confabulate' them. The cognitive profile, characterized by retrograde episodic amnesia, but neither object processing impairment nor confabulations, supports this hypothesis. The study examines the nature of object misidentification based on Ellis' and Staton's account and proposes a new account based on concurrent unbiased retrieval of semantic memory traces and biased recollection of episodic memory traces.
The present study employs neglect dyslexia (ND) as an experimental model to study compound-word p... more The present study employs neglect dyslexia (ND) as an experimental model to study compound-word processing; in particular, it investigates whether compound constituents are hierarchically organized at mental level and addresses the possibility of whole-word representation. Seven Italian-speaking patients suffering from ND participated in a word naming task. Both left-headed (pescespada, swordfish) and right-headed (astronave, spaceship) Italian compound nouns were used as stimuli. Non-existent compounds, which were generated by substituting the leftmost constituent of a compound with an orthographically similar word (e.g., *pestespada, *plaguesword), were also employed. A significant headedness effect emerged in the group analysis: patients read left-headed compounds better than right-headed compounds. A significant lexicality effect was also found: the participants read real compounds better than their non-existent compound pairs. Moreover, logit mixed-effects analyses indicated a left-hand constituent frequency effect. Results are discussed in terms of hierarchical representation of compounds and direct access to compound lemma nodes.
It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-... more It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of both the compound and its constituents should play a role when performing tasks involving compound processing, e.g., compound-word reading. This issue is investigated in the present study through an assessment of the performance of a deep dyslexic patient (GR) in three compound-reading experiments. In the first experiment, verb-noun (VN) compound nouns (e.g., lavapiatti, "dishwasher", lit. wash-dishes) were employed as stimuli, while in the second, VN compound stimuli were embedded in sentences, and were compared to paired verb phrases (e.g., lui lava piatti, "he washes dishes"). Position-specific effects were ruled out by means of a third experiment, which investigated the retrieval of noun-noun compounds (e.g., pescespada, "swordfish", lit. fishsword). In experiment 1, GR made errors on the verb constituent more frequently than on the noun, an effect that did not emerge in Experiment 2: when embedded in sentences, VN compounds were read significantly better than verb-phrases and no grammatical-class effect emerged. In Experiment 3, the first and the second constituent were read with the same level of accuracy. The disproportionate impairment, which emerged in reading the verb component of nominal VN compounds, indicates that the grammatical properties of constituents are being retrieved, and thus confirms access to the constituent lemma-nodes. However, the results suggested a whole-word representation when compounds are embedded in sentences; since the sentence context affects the access to compounds through syntactic constraints, whole-word representation is arguably at the lemma level as well (multiple-lemma representation). Experiment 3 indicates that these effects cannot be accounted for by a position-specific impairment.
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