Lexical properties, prosody, and syntax: implications for normal and disordered language

Abstract

This paper is primarily about sentence processing in neurologically intact subjects--but carries with it the underlying message that though both grammatical and on-line analyses of agrammatism have borne considerable fruit, there is much about the efforts from normal psycholinguistics that has yet to find its way into investigations of aphasia. We describe some of our psycholinguistic work and show how it has influenced our work in aphasia. This work involves three different kinds of information that the human sentence processing system appears to exploit: (1) lexical properties, particularly those having to do with verbs; (2) syntactic operations that connect one position in the sentence to another, nonadjacent position; and (3) prosody, which is often overlooked but which may turn out to be crucial to accounts of both normal and disordered sentence processing. Finally, we suggest that lexical properties interact with prosody to help the parser in its initial analysis.