Abstract

In the current study, the syntactic processing related with the comprehension and production processes was examined. In order to see agrammatism in comprehending and producing the subjective and objective cases, the sentence-picture matching task and the sentence completion task were employed. The sentence-picture matching task was to measure the comprehension performance of the semantically reversible sentences. The semantically reversible sentences can't be understood correctly without understanding the subjective and objective case postpositions. The results of the sentence-picture task showed that the agrammatic Broca patient comprehended the semantically reversible sentences 100% correctly. Two sentence completion tasks were used to evaluate the production processing of the case postpositions and morphological inflections. In the sentence completion task, the patient produced the correct case postpositions about 50% correctly. The dissociation in comprehending and producing the subjective and objective case postpositions found in the sentence-picture matching and sentence completion tasks implicates that the syntactic processes involved in comprehending and producing the case postpositions are distinct. In the two sentence completion tasks, it was found that the performance in producing correctly the subject case postpositions was much lower than that in the objective case postpositions. This fact provides the double dissociation in considering the previous studies(Kim, 1997; Lee, 1998). That is, Kim(1997) and Lee(1998) reported that two Broca patients showed superior performance in producing the objective cases to the performance in the subjective cases. Thus, the current and the previous studies suggest that the different case postpositions are processed differently. Also, the single dissociation in inflection for tense and aspect was found. Based on this single dissociation, it is possible that the inflections for the tense and aspect might be modular in the respects of the functional localization or information processing.