Abstract
A key notion in linguistics is that of syntactic movement. I will show that this notion and the further theoretical observations and generalizations regarding movement are useful in accounting for language impairments. I will describe syntactic impairments of various sources: acquired (following stroke, tumour, tumor resection), developmental, and neurodegenerative (progressive aphasia, Parkinson's Disease, Machado Joseph Ataxia), and show how useful a good syntactic theory is in assessing, describing, and treating these impairments.
Individuals with these syntactic impairments all show similar pattern of selective deficits: they fail to understand and produce some sentences, but perform well on other sentences. This complex pattern can be readily understood on the basis of syntactic theory: The impaired structures share a common property: they are all derived by syntactic movement, in which a full noun phrase moves to the beginning of the sentence across another full noun phrase. This captures the difficulty in object questions, object relative clauses, and object topicalized structures. I will show several bases for syntactic impairments in children and adolescents, including nutrition, hearing loss, and brain damage.
This generalization that syntactic theory provides also opens the path for accurate and sensitive assessment of syntactic impairments. Indeed, when these movement structures are used in assessment, children and adolescents who have been previously identified as "learning impaired" can receive a diagnosis that fits their exact source of difficulties. I will present data from 275 Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic speaking children and adolescents who show deficits exactly in these structures, and will also show how selective this syntactic deficit can be, and how common these structures are in everyday speech and school materials. From this accurate diagnosis, the door is open to treatment that is targeted to these syntactic structures, as well as educational adaptations that are sensitive to the sentences that are more difficult for this population.
I will then show data, some of which from last week, on the brain underpinnings of syntactic movement. I will show some fMRI data on brain activations parallel to syntactic movement, and then move to lessons from patients with glioma who undergo awake surgery.
I will conclude by showing how syntactic theory can benefit neurosurgery in protecting language areas.
