Artificial grammar learning in individuals with severe aphasia

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Zimmerer, V.C., Cowell, P.E., & Varley, R.A. (2014). Artificial grammar learning in individuals with severe aphasia. Neuropsychologia, 53, 25-38.

"Syntactic disorder" can be defined as an impairment of sentence processing, in comprehension as well as production, in spoken language as well as written, despite relatively intact processing of individual words. It is a terrible disorder. Our communication is mostly about who did what to whom, and when. If we lose this ability the complexity of what we can say and understand suffers a lot. People with aphasia can have a complex mental life and above average intelligence, but can find themselves unable to share any of that.

This paper is based on my PhD project.

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Preservation of passive constructions in a patient with primary progressive aphasia.

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Zimmerer, V.C., Dąbrowska, E., Romanowski, C.A.J., Blank, C., & Varley, R.A. (2014). Preservation of passive constructions in a patient with primary progressive aphasia. Cortex, 50, 7-18.

"WR" had primary progressive aphasia, a type of dementia which starts out as a language disorder. His grammatical profile showed a pattern that, according to many theories of grammar and aphasia, should not exist: WR was good at understanding passive sentences, such as The lion is killed by the man, but very poor at actives such as The man kills the lion, which are considered easier and more resistant to brain damage. More importantly, many theories predict that if someone has difficulties with actives, that person should find passives at least as difficult.

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Individual behavior in learning of an artificial grammar.

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Zimmerer, V.C., Cowell, P.E., Varley, R.A. (2011). Individual behavior in learning of an artificial grammar. Memory & Cognition, 39(3), 491-501.

Artifical grammar learning is supposed to tap into processes so basic to human cognition that many seem to assume that they are "universal", the same for every human. As a result researchers focus too much on group averages and do not look at individual differences in performance. If you do you find out that even healthy individuals do very different things within the same experimental condition. My life would be easier if this were not the case.

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Recursion in severe aphasia.

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Zimmerer, V.C., & Varley, R.A. (2010). Recursion in severe aphasia. In H. van der Hulst (Ed.): Recursion and human language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 393-406.

The volume is the result from the first conference on recursion in language hosted by the fascinating Dan Everett at Illinois State University in 2006. About a hundred people got together trying to figure out what Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch were talking about in their seminal, but pretty vague Science paper.

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Intact and impaired fundamentals of syntax: Artificial grammar learning in healthy speakers and people with aphasia

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Zimmerer, V. (2010). Intact and impaired fundamentals of syntax: Artificial grammar learning in healthy speakers and people with aphasia. Doctoral thesis. University of Sheffield.

My time as a PhD student had too great an impact for a short post to do it justice. I lived in England for the first time, met incredible people and my experiences with persons with aphasia (language disorder resulting from brain damage or degeneration) changed the way I think about many things in life.

Artificial grammar learning is a fascinating empirical paradigm, but it my a project a tough sell to linguists and speech and language therapists alike. Why test grammar not using words, but nonsensical blobs on a computer screen? The answer is that the human mind is driven by pattern finding, and tapping into core pattern processing mechanisms reveals something about language in healthy speakers and pathologies.

I was supervised by Rosemary Varley and Patricia Cowell, who were simply optimal.

Herrschaft durch Sprachherrschaft (Control through language)

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Zimmerer, V. (2006). Herrschaft durch Sprachherrschaft? Was uns die Psycholinguistik über die „Macht der Wörter“ sagen kann. Aptum: Zeitschrift für Sprachkritik und Sprachkultur 2, 137-156.

Zimmerer, V. (2006). Herrschaft durch Sprachherrschaft? Was uns die Psycholinguistik über die „Macht der Wörter“ sagen kann. Berlin: Weißensee Verlag.

These two publications are based on my Masters dissertation. Actually, the monograph is my dissertation with some edits. The project was supervised at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf by Martin Wengeler and Martina Penke.

I did my Masters degree in German linguistics (which for the most part mixed philosophy and sociolinguistics), with psycholinguistics and German literature as minors. Since I became increasingly interested in psycholinguistics, but did not want to change my major, I had to figure out a way to do psycholinguistics in the wrong department.

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