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A double dissociation but a single mechanism? Further neuropsychological evidence on the past-tense debate.
Authors:
PATTERSON, K.
Reference:
In Proceedings of the 9th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco California, April 2002.
Year of publication:
2002
CBU number:
5189
Abstract:
Building on findings by Ullman and others, we have documented a dramatic deficit on irregular past-tenses in patients with semantic dementia, and a greater difficulty with regular verbs in Broca's aphasics. These patterns can be explained by both theoretical positions under consideration; but we also find a strong correlation between the extent of impairment on irregular vs. regular past tense and the degree of semantic vs. phonological deficit, which seems to favour an integrated, interactive system differentially affected by disruption to these two general components of language processing. Further results germane to the current debate include (a) errors in past-tense generation by semantically impaired patients (e.g., freeze -->"frozed") that appear to reflect both regular and irregular knowledge in the same response; and (b) the fact that close control of phonological complexity reduces or in some tasks may even eliminate the advantage for irregular verbs in patients with phonological deficits.
