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2003
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Course Description |
Behavioral
Plasticity and Language Disorders
Herman Kolk
University of Nijmegen,
The Netherlsnds
1. Agrammatic sentence production (1)
In the first lecture I will deal with the basic
symptomatology and its variability. I will argue that only few theories can
handle both the symptoms and their variability. I will discuss and evaluate
these theories in the light of a number of recent studies and conclude in favor
of an account in terms of a reduced temporal window. I will then present the
concept of strategic simplification and relate it to the concept of
goal-referenced selection of verbal action. I will also present recent
brain-imaging evidence to support the claim that syntactic simplification
actually helps to reduce computational load.
Required Readings:
A Time-Based Approaching to Agrammatic Production;
Agrammatic Sentence Production.
2. Agrammatic sentence production (2),
In the second lecture I will deal
with the symptom of nonfluency. In the basis of recent empirical evidence, I
will argue for a syntactic basis of nonfluency. I will then present out covert
repair hypothesis and relate it to the speech monitoring literature. Evidence
for the covert repair hypothesis will be discussed.
Required Readings:
A Time-Based Approaching to Agrammatic Production;
Agrammatic Sentence Production.
3. Agrammatic sentence comprehension (1).
In the third lecture, extant
theories of agrammatic comprehension will be discussed: trace deletion,
mapping, capacity limitation. Theories will be evaluated in the light of
studies on sentence picture matching, grammaticality judgement and plausiblity
judgment. I will conclude in favor of a capacity limitation account.
Required Readings:
4. Agrammatic sentence comprehension (2)
In he fourth lecture I will discuss the
relationship between the agrammatic deficit and verbal working memory. I will
present recent ERP evidence to support the claim that the capacity limitation
in aphasics is of the same kind as we see in normal people. Furthermore, our
data suggest a unitary architecture of verbal working memory. Finally the
possiblity of adaptive strategies in normal people will be discussed
Required Readings:
Herman Kolk
Herman Kolk
was born in 1944 in Amsterdam. He was trained in experimental psychology at the
University of Amsterdam and received his Ph.D. from the University of Nijmegen,
the Netherlands. From 1976 to 1977 he was a research fellow at the Veterans
Administration Hospital in Boston where he developed a longstanding interest in
the study of aphasia. He is currently a staff member of the Nijmegen
Institute for Cognition Research and Information and a professor if neuropsychology
at the Univeristy of Nijmegen. Kolk has published numerous papers on human
memory, language, aphasia, stuttering and dyslexia. Methods of study are
linguistic analysis, psycholinguistic experimentation, computational modelling and
event related potential measurements. Current topics are behavioral plasticity
in aphasia, capacity contraints in normal and disordered language
processing and language monitoring.