TY - JOUR
T1 - Closed- and open-class lexical access in agrammatic and fluent aphasics
AU - Gordon, Barry
AU - Caramazza, Alfonso
N1 - Funding Information:
This study was supported in part by Grants NS 16155 and NS 14099 from the National Institutes of Health (NINCDS) to The Johns Hopkins University. Portions of this work were presented at the Annual Meetings of the Academy of Aphasia in October 1981 and October 1982. The authors thank Dr. Steven G. Lapointe for help in selecting stimuli, John P. Lewis for programming, Clara Marin and Kate Van Dyke for testing patients. Drs. Rita Berndt, Dianne Bradley, Merrill Garrett, and Edgar Zurif for helpful discussions. and Renee Gordon for editorial perspicacity. Address reprint requests to Barry Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., Cognitive NeurologyiNeuropsychology, Meyer 2-222, Johns Hopkins Hospital, 600 North Wolfe Street, Baltimore. MD 21205.
PY - 1983/7
Y1 - 1983/7
N2 - Bradley, Garrett, and Zurif (Bradley, Computational distinctions of vocabulary type. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, MIT Press; Cambridge, MA, 1978; Biological studies of mental processes, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980) have suggested that closed-class word access is normally mediated by a different route than the open-class one, and that the loss of this closed-class route might account for agrammatism. However, in an earlier study (Gordon & Caramazza, Brain and Language, 15, 143-160, 1982) we were not able to confirm a meaningful difference between closed- and open-class word frequency responsiveness of the type Bradley (unpublished dissertation, 1978) had seemed to find in normal subjects. We have now done a direct comparison of closed-class frequency sensitivity in agrammatic and nonagrammatic aphasics, to directly test Bradley and colleagues' hypotheses and to avoid some of the experimental problems with between-class frequency comparisons. We find that closed-class words behave similarly whether or not the subject is agrammatic. Therefore, the differences between agrammatic and nonagrammatic aphasics must arise at a deeper level (or levels) of lexical processing than the one probed by the frequency sensitivity effect.
AB - Bradley, Garrett, and Zurif (Bradley, Computational distinctions of vocabulary type. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, MIT Press; Cambridge, MA, 1978; Biological studies of mental processes, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980) have suggested that closed-class word access is normally mediated by a different route than the open-class one, and that the loss of this closed-class route might account for agrammatism. However, in an earlier study (Gordon & Caramazza, Brain and Language, 15, 143-160, 1982) we were not able to confirm a meaningful difference between closed- and open-class word frequency responsiveness of the type Bradley (unpublished dissertation, 1978) had seemed to find in normal subjects. We have now done a direct comparison of closed-class frequency sensitivity in agrammatic and nonagrammatic aphasics, to directly test Bradley and colleagues' hypotheses and to avoid some of the experimental problems with between-class frequency comparisons. We find that closed-class words behave similarly whether or not the subject is agrammatic. Therefore, the differences between agrammatic and nonagrammatic aphasics must arise at a deeper level (or levels) of lexical processing than the one probed by the frequency sensitivity effect.
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U2 - 10.1016/0093-934X(83)90075-5
DO - 10.1016/0093-934X(83)90075-5
M3 - Article
C2 - 6883076
AN - SCOPUS:0020553213
SN - 0093-934X
VL - 19
SP - 335
EP - 345
JO - Brain and Language
JF - Brain and Language
IS - 2
ER -