Lesion-site affects grammatical gender assignment in German: perception and production data.

Full Abstract

Two experiments investigated phonological, derivational-morphological and semantic aspects of grammatical gender assignment in a perception and a production task in German aphasic patients and age-matched controls. The agreement of a gender indicating adjective (feminine, masculine or neuter) and a noun was evaluated during perception in Experiment 1 (grammaticality judgment). In Experiment 2 the same participants had to produce the matching definite article to a noun. In the perception task patients with left frontal lesions (LF) made more errors during phonological gender assignment as compared to derivational-morphological and semantic gender assignment, while patients with lesions of the posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) made more errors in derivational-morphological gender assignment as compared to phonological and semantic gender assignment. In the production task no differences between patient groups were found. These data support previous evidence that left frontal brain areas are critically involved in phonological processing. The pSTG on the other hand may be critically engaged in the integration of phonological and lexical information essential for phonological and derivational-morphological gender assignment.

Author information

Author/s: Hofmann, Juliane (J); Kotz, Sonja A (SA); Marschhauser, Anke (A); Yves von Cramon, D (D); Friederici, Angela D (AD);

Affiliation: Experimental Neuropsychology Unit, Saarland University, P.O. Box 151150, 66041 Saarbruecken, Germany. j.hofmann(-atsign-)mx.uni-saarland.de

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Journal Article

Journal: Neuropsychologia (Neuropsychologia), published in England. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2007-Mar; vol 45 (issue 5) : pp 954-65

Dates: Created 2006/12/25; Completed 2007/04/26;

PMID: 17098262, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 2/18/2009, IMS Date: )

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