Graduate Center, City University of New York.
J Cogn Neurosci. 1989 Winter;1(1):25-37. doi: 10.1162/jocn.1989.1.1.25.
The effects of prior semantic context upon lexical access during sentence processing were examined for three groups of subjects; nonfluent agrammatic (Broca's) aphasic patients; fluent (Wernicke's) aphasic patients; and neurologically intact control patients. Subjects were asked to comprehend auditorily presented, structurally simple sentences containing lexical ambiguities, which were in a context strongly biased toward just one interpretation of that ambiguity. While listening to each sentence, subjects also had to perform a lexical decision task upon a visually presented letter string. For the fluent Wernicke's patients, as for the controls, lexical decisions for visual words related to each of the meanings of the ambiguity were facilitated. By contrast, agrammatic Broca's patients showed significant facilitation only for visual words related to the a priori most frequent interpretation of the ambiguity. On the basis of these data, we suggest that normal form-based word retrieval processes are crucially reliant upon the cortical tissue implicated in agrammatism, but that even the focal brain damage yielding agrammatism does not destroy the normally encapsulated form of word access. That is, we propose that in agrammatism, the modularity of word access during sentence comprehension is rendered less efficient but not lost. Additionally, we consider a number of broader issues involved in the use of pathological material to infer characteristics of the neurological organization of cognitive architecture.
非流畅性语法缺失型失语症患者；流畅性（韦尼克氏）失语症患者；以及神经学上无损伤的对照组患者。要求被试听觉理解包含词汇歧义的结构简单的句子，这些句子的语境强烈偏向歧义的一种解释。当被试听每个句子时，他们还必须对视觉呈现的字母串执行词汇判断任务。对于流畅性的韦尼克氏失语症患者和对照组患者来说，与歧义的每一种意义相关的视觉词汇的词汇判断都得到了促进。相比之下，语法缺失型布罗卡氏失语症患者仅对歧义的先验最常见解释相关的视觉词汇表现出显著的促进作用。基于这些数据，我们认为正常基于形式的单词检索过程严重依赖于与语法缺失相关的皮质组织，但即使导致语法缺失的局灶性脑损伤也没有破坏单词访问的正常封装形式。也就是说，我们提出在语法缺失症中，句子理解过程中的词汇访问的模块化效率降低，但并未丧失。此外，我们还考虑了使用病理性材料推断认知架构的神经组织特征所涉及的一些更广泛的问题。
