Disorders of Syntactic Comprehension

On the basis of a decade's work on syntactic-comprehension disorders, primarily inthe Neurolinguistics Laboratory of the Montreal Neurological Hospital, David Caplan and NancyHildebrandt present an original theory of these disturbances of language function. They suggest inthis wide-ranging study that syntactic structure breaks down after damage to the brain because ofspecific impairments in the parsing processes and a general decrease in the amount of computationalspace that can be devoted to that function.Disorders of Syntactic Comprehension includes detailedsingle-case analyses and large-group studies, as well as a broad review of the literature onaphasia. It also provides introductions to syntactic structures and parsing for the readerunfamiliar with these subjects. It develops a general framework for viewing disorders in this areaand for identifying a number of specific aspects of the breakdown of syntactic comprehension.Theauthors' richly detailed empirical linguistic database and their careful use of experimentalmaterials enable them to bring the results of their research to bear on several aspects of theoriesof syntactic structure (Chomsky's theory) and parsing (the Berwick-Weinberg parser) and to use thesetheories to describe and explain aphasic phenomena. Moreover, the combination of population andgroup studies allows them to investigate the neurological basis of syntactic disorders in additionto the psychological and linguistic aspects.David N. Caplan is Associate Professor of Neurology andLinguistics at McGill University. Nancy Hildebrandt is in the Neurolinguistics Laboratory at theMassachusetts General Hospital. Disorders of Syntactic Comprehension is included in the seriesIssues in the Biology of Language and Cognition, edited by John C. Marshall.