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The on-line processing of unaccusativity in Greek agrammatism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2011

ELENI PERISTERI ,
IANTHI-MARIA TSIMPLI  and
KYRANA TSAPKINI
ELENI PERISTERI*
Affiliation:
Aristotle University of Thesaloniki
IANTHI-MARIA TSIMPLI
Affiliation:
Aristotle University of Thesaloniki
KYRANA TSAPKINI
Affiliation:
John Hopkins University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Eleni Peristeri, Aristotle University of Thesaloniki, School of English, Ethnikis Aminis, P. C. 54 124, Office 308A, Thessaloniki, Greece. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , March 2013 , pp. 233 - 276
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011 

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