Reception of Language in Broca's Aphasia* - Haskins Laboratories

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14Like Linebarger, Schwartz and Saffran (1983b), we find it implausible to suppose that the judgment task
could permit syntactic structure to be computed by an alternative processing route. As these authors
point out, this supposition amounts to the claim that there exists a separate, redundant sentence parser
that is employed solely off line in certain tasks. It should also be mentioned that the Zurif and
Grodzinsky proposal, which envisions such a delay between the arrival of an utterance and its structural
analysis, entails unrealistic demands on working memory. That is, suppose that Broca's aphasics are
unable to carry out on-line parsing. In order to judge grammaticality, then, they would be forced to
accumulate and store a sentence as an unstructured aggregate of words that are subsequently fed into
the special off-line parsing device. However, it seems to us that the verbal memory limitations of
agrammatic aphasics would render them even less capable of such a feat than normal subjects.
Shankweiler et ai.