Friday, November 8th, 11.30am ET (4.30pm UTC)
Presentation in Zoom, accessible via the C-STAR website:
http://cstar.sc.edu/lecture-series/

Attempting to quantify expressive syntactic competence

Jeremy Yeaton
University of California, Irvine

Sentence production is a linguistically challenging task at multiple levels of processing, and yet has been the subject of relatively little research compared to sentence comprehension. In particular, expressive syntactic deficits in aphasia–which result in speakers producing ungrammatical sentences–remain poorly described or understood. To move this needle, I will present a novel framework for the analysis of syntactic structure in discourse based on mechanistic psycholinguistic models of sentence production. In a sample of patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia, I will show that this methodology captures quantifiable, neurally meaningful linguistic deficits, above and beyond existing methodologies to characterize syntactic performance. To further advance our understanding of grammatical aspects of sentence production, I will present preliminary data from a novel task aimed at assessing and dissociating receptive and expressive syntactic performance. Finally, I will present data from an unusually large sample of acute stroke patients (n=845) which raises questions about the prevailing wisdom of left-hemisphere dominance of language across the population.
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The online lecture can be followed online from your computer, tablet or smartphone, in Zoom. The zoom link is accessible via the C-STAR website: http://cstar.sc.edu/lecture-series/

The watch party for the lecture will be in Discovery, room #140 (915 Greene Street, Columbia, SC)

For more information, or to be added to the C-STAR mailing list, contact Dirk den Ouden: [email protected]

Linguistic Field(s): Clinical Linguistics
Cognitive Science
General Linguistics
Neurolinguistics
Syntax