1. What is the specific question being asked in their study?
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2. What are the experimental conditions (independent variable(s)) being tested (both linguistic and neurological)?
Neurological: type of aphasia.
Linguistic: sentence type, probe location
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3. What are the linguistic constructions being tested?
Object-relative sentences and subject-relative sentences.
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4. What does each contribute to the exploration of the question? (Why do they use these constructions?
Subject-relative sentences. They were chosen because Broca’s patients show relatively normal comprehension for this constructions. however Wernicke’s patients are un predictable, more often than not showing chance comprehension. Thus, the authors could determined if, for the Broca’s group, slower-than-nomral lexical activation disallowed normal gap-filling even for sentences correctly comprehended and they could determine if even in such circumstances Broca’s were abnormally reliant on non-grammatical strategies.
Object-relative sentences. Their interest in this construction had to do with the Wernicke’s patients, who also show less-than-normal comprehension for these sentences. They wanted to broaden the base of their observations of this groups’s gap filling capacity, particularly because reactivation in subject-relatives might have been affected by the relativizer ‘who’ in that construction and also because movement within subject-relatives have the special property of being ’string vacuous’, i.e., such movement does not reorder any of the elements of the sequence. As for Broca’s, they expected that they would not show gap filling of object-relatives since they had not shwon gap filling for subject-relative.
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5. What is the kind of measurement (dependent variable(s)) being used?
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6. In two sentences, what is the outcome reported?
Syntactic comprehension limitations in Broca’s aphasia can be traced to changes in cortically localizable resources that sustain lexical processing.
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7. What are the two methodological issues the authors are concerned with?
Subject selection and interpretation of online and offline data.
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8. How do the authors describe gap-filling and what is the connection with Broca’s aphasia?
Gap filling is a hypothesized processing mechanism supported experimentally by priming data that allows the association of a GAP location and its antecedent.
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