Electrophysiological manifestations of open- and closed-class words in patients with Broca's aphasia with agrammatic comprehension: An event-related brain potential study

Ter Keurs, M., Brown, C. M., Hagoort, P., & Stegeman, D. F. (1999). Electrophysiological manifestations of open- and closed-class words in patients with Broca's aphasia with agrammatic comprehension: An event-related brain potential study. Brain, 122, 839-854. doi:10.1093/brain/122.5.839.
This paper presents electrophysiological data on the on-line processing of open- and closed-class words in patients with Broca’s aphasia with agrammatic comprehension. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from the scalp when Broca patients and nonaphasic control subjects were visually presented with a story in which the words appeared one at a time on the screen. Separate waveforms were computed for open- and closed-class words. The non-aphasic control subjects showed clear differences between the processing of open- and closed-class words in an early (210-375 ms) and a late (400-700 ms) time-window.The early electrophysiological differences reflect the first manifestation of the availability of word-category information from the mental lexicon. The late differences presumably relate to post-lexical semantic and syntactic processing. In contrast to the control subjects, the Broca patients showed no early vocabulary class effect and only a limited late effect. The results suggest that an important factor in the agrammatic comprehension deficit of Broca’s aphasics is a delayed and/or incomplete availability of word-class information.
Publication type
Journal article
Publication date
1999

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