Neurolinguistics

RESUMO
Este artigo objetiva discutir criticamente a avaliação de linguagem na Demência de Alzheimer (DA). Instrumentos de avaliação neuropsicológica geralmente apresentam alguns testes como sendo “de linguagem” e seus resultados buscam confirmar o diagnóstico ou avaliar a progressão da doença. Buscamos apontar, por meio de análises qualitativas, à luz da Neurolingüística Discursiva, que os episódios dialógicos que ocorrem durante a anamnese ou ao longo das sessões de testes podem levar a uma melhor compreensão de como a linguagem encontra-se (ou não) alterada nos casos em que há uma provável DA.

ABSTRACT
This paper aims to discuss language evaluation in the Alzheimer disease (AD). Neuropsychological assessment tests usually present some of them as being “language evaluation” and the results aim to confirm the diagnosis or to evaluate the disease progression. We intend to show, by means of qualitative approach, oriented by the Discursive Neurolinguistics, that the dialogical episodes that take place during the interviews and tests sessions could lead to a better comprehension of how language is altered (or not) in probable cases of AD.

We describe an individual who exhibits greater dif®culties in speaking nouns than verbs and greater dif®culties in writing verbs than nouns across a range of both single word and sentence production tasks. This double dissociation of grammatical category by modality within a single individual represents an important challenge to the claim that all apparent category grammatical de®cits can be reduced to the effects of the various semantic variables. The modality-speci®c nature of the ®ndings clearly support the representation of grammatical category distinctions at postsemantic levels of representations and processing and they raise a number of questions regarding the speci®c instantiation of these distinctions within current theoretical frameworks of language production. q There have been a number of reports of individuals with neurological damage who seem to have especial dif®culties with words from certain grammatical categories but not others. These dissociations may involve nouns vs verbs (

Within the alternative concepts of “twosystem” and “singlesystem” language models, brain mechanisms for the generation of regular and irregular forms of Russian verbs have been studied. The evoked EEG activity was recorded in 19 channels with random alternation of different speechmorphology opera tions. The infinitives of imperfective verbs that belong either to the productive group (conventionally, the default, or regular, class) or to the unproductive group (conventionally, the irregular class) were presented to healthy subjects. The subjects were to produce the firstperson presenttime forms of these verbs. The results of the analysis of the eventrelated potentials (ERPs) of 22 subjects are presented. Statistically valid ERP amplitude distinctions between the verb groups are found only in latencies of 600–850 ms in the central and parietal zones of the cortex. The peak values of the irregularverb potentials are negative in this region in rela tion to the peak values of the regularverb potentials. The findings are interpreted as the effect of various com plexities of mental work with verbs of different groups and do not support the hypothesis of the universality of the twosystem brain mechanism for processing regular and irregular language phenomena.

Most contemporary text books of neurology and of psychology pay little attention to the function of the cerebellum beyond noting it to be an organ of motor control. A historical overview of research on cerebellar function is presented, from pre-Sherrinton suggestions of sensory and motor function, through the post-Sherrinton and dominant 20 th . Century view of "motor" function, to the 21 st . century perspective of "sensorimotor" function. The intrinsic capability of the cerebellum is briefly considered in terms of: its size/complexity/capacity; its information representation/processing characteristics (with "a particular computational function"); its sensory information processing capability; and, its role in sensorimotor regulatory control. It is suggested that the cerebellum can process sensorimotor stimulus information in a statistical (connectionist type) manner and respond to in on the basis of its own learning based sensorimotor representations, albeit at a "level" that does not necessarily involve cerebral "awareness".

Reading words in a native language triggers a largely obligatory cognitive process that we accept as leading to comprehension of the word-we cannot suppress our understanding of word meaning. In this study, we investigated the early stages of this comprehension process by means of event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify when this processing of meaning-that is, semantic processing-first occurs. We report that, when processing visually presented compound words, semantic access at some level occurs as early as the P100 and persists through to the N400. Specifically, we focused on the P100 ERP component, and utilized the unique features of compound words (i.e. variation in the transparency of meaning) to investigate the speed with which we gain access to information about meaning (i.e. semantic access). Twenty-two participants performed a lexical decision task including 40 English compounds, which varied with respect to their constituent semantic transparency. Compounds ranged from ...

In the modern era, many methods for the instruction of language principles and skills have been proposed, developed, and implemented to assist language learners with their advancement. In this paper, the unique concept of formulaic sequences is presented and examined to demonstrate its practical utility for instruction and furtherance of the skills of English language learners in the classroom. This language concept, while relatively novel and currently underutilized within contemporary instructional situations, has the capacity to provide a clear and engaging framework to accelerate language learning, and qualify students to an exceptional level. The idea has gained considerable momentum as studies in linguistics, neuroscience, and psychology have contributed to its recognition as a logical and legitimate base from which to bolster the development of new and sensible methods for students. A presentation of the history and theories underlying the concept of formulaic sequences is provided, along with a practical component and suggestions for its use in the instructional context.

Reading performance has been shown to be linked with balancing skills, possibly indicating an involvement of the cerebellum in reading-related tasks. In our study, we examined whether a similar connection can be detected for arithmetic performance. We assessed basic arithmetic skills of 8-10-year-old children (n ¼ 53) and asked them to balance on the left or right foot, with eyes open or closed. Results revealed substantial correlations between performance in arithmetic tasks and in the balancing tasks with closed eyes even when controlling for attentional and reasoning capabilities. These findings are interpreted in terms of a cerebellar involvement in arithmetic tasks. We propose that verbally mediated arithmetic tasks like multiplication might be related to cerebellar functions in different ways than those arithmetic tasks that require elaboration strategies and quantity manipulations, such as subtraction.

Arab children acquire the Spoken Arabicammia (SA)at home and are exposed to literary Arabicfus ̣ h ̣ a (so-called Modern Standard Arabic, MSA)only at school age. This diglossia was found to affect reading acquisition in Arabic. The study was undertaken to determine whether a supra-lexical factor, in this research working memory, affects meta-lingual performance, which is critical for the development of reading skill in Arabic language readers; and whether this effect differs with age, from 1st through 12th grade of school. Short-term memory was found to be involved in and affect phonemic manipulations at all grade levels: the longer the manipulated stimulus, the poorer the performance. The finding is in line with the "transparency-by-modularity" interaction, and suggests that Arabic is a "semi-modular" language in contrast to highly modular Hebrew. A theory to account for acquisition of literary Arabic at an early age is proposed based on the study results and previous findings.

Recent evidence suggests that certain types of figurative language, such as conventional metaphors or idioms, may have a left hemisphere processing advantage or are processed similarly in both hemispheres. Sarcasm, however, is likely processed differently than other types of figurative language in the hemispheres because readers often need to construct a novel interpretation of sarcastic text to successfully understand the text's sarcastic meaning. To investigate how the hemispheres process sarcasm during text comprehension, participants in the current study read sarcastic, literal, and neutral texts and made lexical decisions to related target words presented to either the left visual field-right hemisphere or the right visual field-left hemisphere. Facilitation for sarcastic texts was greater in the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere. In addition, facilitation was greater for literal texts than sarcastic texts in the left hemisphere. These findings suggest that the right hemisphere may play a unique role when readers encounter sarcasm during text comprehension.

La investigación experimental de las últimas décadas ha ido revelando aspectos de la naturaleza neurocognitiva de la sintaxis, algunos de los cuales se recogen y discuten en este capítulo. La selección de temas, resultados e interpretación de la evidencia se ha hecho teniendo en cuenta principalmente la perspectiva de la teoría lingüística, y por ello haré más hincapié en la relevancia de algunos resultados obtenidos por la investigación en neurocognición del lenguaje sobre la sintaxis, que en los aspectos metodológicos relacionados con las técnicas de neuroimagen y el diseño experimental que se utilizan en estos trabajos. Intentaré ofrecer una visión de algunas de las contribuciones que considero más significativas en el estudio de la neurocognición de la sintaxis, visión que será necesariamente parcial e incompleta, dado el enorme número y disparidad de contribuciones que se publican actualmente en este campo. Para una presentación y defensa de la lingüística generativa dentro de la neurociencia cognitiva del lenguaje, léase Marantz (2005); para discusiones más detalladas sobre sintaxis donde se discuten también métodos y sus características, léanse Embick y Poeppel (2005), Grodzinsky y Friederici (2006) y las numerosas referencias citadas en estos trabajos.

by Joanna Moura

The purpοse οf this study is tο map the prοfile οf patients with aphasia in the οral language areas by analyzing the types of paraphasia. Specifically, the speech samples were acquired from the Greek Corpus of Aphasic Discourse, which consists of examination interviews in aphasic patients. All the interviews took place at Athens Eginition Hospital. Of these samples 26 were annotated and transcribed. The interview techniques were based on the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, while the annotation and transcription follow text linguistics conventions. Paraphasias concerning all levels of linguistic analysis in the interviews were identified. The study aims at analyzing and assessing paraphasias of speech of aphasic patients.

Coorientadora: Fernanda de Carvalho Rodrigues Aspecto, segundo Comrie (1976), refere-se às diferentes maneiras de se visualizar a composição temporal interna de uma situação. O aspecto perfect, mais especificamente, é um intervalo de tempo que inclui o momento do evento e se estende até o momento de referência, podendo este coincidir com o presente, o passado ou o futuro, relacionando dois pontos na linha do tempo (PANCHEVA, 2003). Neste trabalho, interessa-nos a combinação do perfect com o

Статья посвящена нейропсихологическому подходу к исследо-
ванию фонематического слуха и выполнена на материале работ основателя отечественной нейропсихологии А. Р. Лурии. Для анализа привлекаются как классические, широко известные работы ученого, так и неопубликованные архивные материалы. Нарушения фонематического слуха рассматриваются
А. Р. Лурией как основной механизм сенсорной (акустико-гностической) афазии у взрослых больных с локальными поражениями мозга. Статья поднимает вопросы определения А. Р. Лурией с позиций афазиологии понятий фонемы, фонематического слуха, звукового анализа. Отдельно обсуждается роль мо-
торики в фонемном восприятии. Описываются методы нейропсихологической диагностики фонематических нарушений. К обсуждению привлекаются также и те работы А. Р. Лурии, в которых автор, целенаправленно не исследовавший фонематический слух в детском возрасте, так или иначе обращается к этому
вопросу.

The article deals with the historical development of the field of neurolinguistics. It provides a chronological survey of inquiry into the relationship between the language faculty and the human nervous system, beginning with the first such investigations in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. Up to the nineteenth century, most records were single case descriptions of the effects of brain lesions on the language faculty, and the most notable of these are presented in this paper. Some influential attempts were made in the nineteenth century to localize the language faculty in the brain, such as those of Franz J. Gall, Paul Broca, and Carl Wernicke. The twentieth century saw an explosion in the number of theories and experimental methods for investigating the relationship between language and the nervous system, along with the birth of neurolinguistics in the strict sense as an interdisciplinary field of scientific inquiry borne from linguistics and neuroscience in the 1960s.

This study examined the effects of right brain-damage (RBD) on oral discourse production using a multi-layered discourse processing model. Narrative and procedural discourse samples from participants with RBD and no brain damage were analysed in terms of seven broad areas corresponding to the processing levels of the model. Participants also completed attention, cognitive, general communication and RBD assessments. Despite their normal performance on all assessments (except those on attention), the participants with RBD demonstrated statistically significant differences in syntactic complexity, clarity disruptors and dysfluencies, as well as in discourse grammar and clausal structure in the narratives and in cohesion in the procedures. A model-based theoretical explanation accounting for the deficits noted in participants with RBD, together with clinical guidelines, is provided.

Assessment and treatment of bilingual aphasia and dementia using the Bilingual Aphasia Test 1. The Bilingual Aphasia Test Bilingualism in aphasia and dementia is an increasingly well-recognised phenomenon that is now attracting keen interest and research. Given that estimates of bilingualism range between 50 percent and 80 percent of the global population (Azarpazhooh, Jahangiri, & Ghaleh, 2010; Grosjean, 2008) and considering current immigration patterns, bilingual and multilingual individuals speaking diverse languages constitute a significant proportion of clinical and research caseloads. Language impairment and recovery can vary across languages and over time in the individual patient, and across patients, meaning that accurate and valid assessment in each language is essential for effective diagnosis and treatment and in the determination of research outcomes. Consequently, the issue of comprehensive, detailed language assessment for bilingual and multilingual individuals is both topical and pertinent. This Special Issue of the Journal of Neurolinguistics focuses on the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) and its contribution to research in bilingual aphasia and bilingual dementia. Designed and developed by Michel Paradis, and adapted to more than 60 languages in collaboration with colleagues and native speakers of the respective languages, the BAT has proved a vital tool in the assessment of language in bilingual and multilingual individuals (see Paradis, 2004, 2011; Paradis & Libben, 1987 and articles in this issue). At the time of its initial development, very few resources existed to enable comparative language assessment in each language for bilinguals with aphasia. More recent translations of language tests into several languages are welcome and to be encouraged, however to date the BAT remains the only comprehensive standardised language assessment that has been adapted to multiple languages. The BAT was developed with the specific aim of enabling cross-language comparison of language abilities for bilingual and multilingual individuals with aphasia (Paradis, 2011; Paradis & Libben, 1987). It provides a comprehensive, valid and reliable assessment of performance in each language. A core feature of the BAT is that each language version is an adaptation, not a translation. Thus each language version tests grammatical, lexical, morphological and phonological distinctions of equivalent complexity that are relevant for that language. For example, the syntactic comprehension subtest contains stimuli that reflect the grammatical sentence types relevant to each language. A further core feature of the BAT is that it is adapted to each language, not only linguistically, but also culturally. Thus images and items that are culturally and socially appropriate are utilised in each language version of the BAT (Paradis, 2011; Paradis & Libben, 1987). As translations that do not make adequate adjustments for the linguistic and cultural characteristics of a language cannot provide accurate and valid assessment (Hambleton, 2001; Hambleton & Kanjee, 1995; Miller Amberber, 2011), these measures ensure that the BAT does provide both an accurate and valid assessment of ability in each language. Moreover, as languages vary significantly in grammatical and morphological structure and in lexical and Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) sufferers rank second highest in Indonesia. Treatment of tuberculosis that is lived for 6 months will cause physiological, psychological, and social problems for the client. Initially there is a disruption in body image which in turn will affect other aspects of self-concept and cause anxiety so that it can affect interpersonal relationships with others. Aim: This study was conducted to determine the effect of therapeutic communication nurses through selfconcept of anxiety in TB patients Methods: This study was a descriptive study with a cross sectional approach involving 24 TB patients with a selection of Stratified Random Sampling techniques. The instrument used in the form of a questionnaire which was then analyzed by the Path Analysis test significance level p <0.05 Result: Path analysis test results obtained the effect of therapeutic communication on the self concept of 0.000, the effect of communication on anxiety 0.000, and the effect of therapeutic communication on self-concept towards anxiety of TB patients 0.015, therapeutic communication through self-concept indirectly affects the anxiety of TB patients with total values 1,742. Conclusion: Based on the results of the analysis test, data obtained that nurse therapeutic communication through the patient's self concept affects the level of anxiety of TB patients on the condition experienced.

Resumo
Este artigo apresenta parte do trajeto histórico da Neurolingüística Discursiva, retomando conceitos e práticas que articulam discurso com atividade constitutiva, cérebro com linguagem/trabalho. Os dados de linguagem produzidos em meio à visão discursiva e à reflexão acerca da afasia possibilitam por em destaque processos de significação que se interpõem na impossibilidade de dizer por meio de arranjos que selecionam e combinam palavras, o que faz fluir o discurso. Os dados mostram que sujeitos afásicos não dispõem, como antes, dos recursos expressivos para significar, mas experimentam na interlocução outros processos de significação que ajudam na tradução intra e inter-semiótica.

ABSTRAC
This paper shows part of the historical course of Discursive Neurolinguistics, retaking concepts and practices that articulate discourse with constitutive activity, brain with language and work. A discursive point of view enabled us to show up specific processes in aphasic language that affect the speech flow. The data show that aphasics subjects do not have, as before, the expressive resources to mean, but use other ways and the experience in other processes to help them in the translation meaning intra-and inter-semiotics.

We further develop the self-centered model of mental representations for language with the focus on the mechanisms underlying syntactic calculus and the construction of larger meaningful constructs out of the basic syntactic units. We consider the inborn multimodal perception and  the self-concept as an actor in an environment as the basis for concept formation and syntactic construction. Based on relevant findings in language acquisition, we investigate the perceptual, semantic, and syntactic aspects of mental apparatus. We see this apparatus as an overall system that can handle the task of conceptualization and the task of syntactic construction using the same mechanisms. Based on the argument-centered model of mental representations which involves such processing homogeneity, we show the gradual development of the complexity of syntactic formants during language acquisition.

Keywords: language acquisition, syntax complexity, mental operations
ACM classification keywords: I.2.0: Artificial Intelligence, I.2.7: Natural Language Processing

Neuroscientific investigations regarding aspects of emotional experiences usually focus on one stimulus modality (e.g., pictorial or verbal). Similarities and differences in the processing between the different modalities have rarely been studied directly. The comparison of verbal and pictorial emotional stimuli often reveals a processing advantage of emotional pictures in terms of larger or more pronounced emotion effects evoked by pictorial stimuli. In this study, we examined whether this picture advantage refers to general processing differences or whether it might partly be attributed to differences in visual complexity between pictures and words. We first developed a new stimulus database comprising valence and arousal ratings for more than 200 concrete objects representable in different modalities including different levels of complexity: words, phrases, pictograms, and photographs. Using fMRI we then studied the neural correlates of the processing of these emotional stimuli in a valence judgment task, in which the stimulus material was controlled for differences in emotional arousal. No superiority for the pictorial stimuli was found in terms of emotional information processing with differences between modalities being revealed mainly in perceptual processing regions. While visual complexity might partly account for previously found differences in emotional stimulus processing, the main existing processing differences are probably due to enhanced processing in modality specific perceptual regions. We would suggest that both pictures and words elicit emotional responses with no general superiority for either stimulus modality, while emotional responses to pictures are modulated by perceptual stimulus features, such as picture complexity. Citation: Schlochtermeier LH, Kuchinke L, Pehrs C, Urton K, Kappelhoff H, et al. (2013) Emotional Picture and Word Processing: An fMRI Study on Effects of Stimulus Complexity. PLoS ONE 8(2): e55619.

Given the increasing number of bilinguals around the world, bilingual aphasia has become a hot topic in the field of clinical and theoretical research in communication sciences. The aim of this article is to provide data-driven cues for intervention with bilingual aphasia. First, the impact of a number of factors considered to influence second language processing will be discussed with reference to neurolinguistic and neuroimaging data. The discussion will then move to bilingual aphasia. Specifically, we shall describe the recovery patterns following bilingual aphasia, and discuss the issues of pathological mixing and switching. The literature and clinical evidence will provide the framework for a discussion of data-driven cues for intervention with bilingual aphasia. r

RD HOBBS reviews "Talking Hands" by Margalit Fox.
Fox, M. (2007). Talking hands; What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
A team of researchers descend on a village in southern Israel where a Bedouin tribe has 4% deaf population because of the custom of cousins marrying one another. The "organically grown" language of the deaf is an opportunity for linguists to study are relatively new language that should give clues as to how languages come to be. Half of the book is devoted as a narrative of the linguists visiting, recording, photographing, and filming families in their homes, and the other half of the book as intermittent chapters discuss language, linguistics, language in the brain, grammar, and language evolution. Comparisons are drawn between Sign languages, sign language communities, grammars, and more.

RD Hobbs Book Review
Fox, M. (2007). Talking Hands. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
A team of researchers descend on a village in Southern Israel inhabited by a Bedouin tribe with 4% deaf population due to cousins marrying. The normal statistic for deaf population is one out of 1,000 to one out of 10,000, not four out of 100. Having deaf family members in the village is normal. Deaf children do not grow up in isolation. As a result, a deaf language organically evolved. The more dependable way of observing the evolved language is to observe a deaf child with his hearing sibling. The reason is that deaf children go to school and learn Israeli Sign language. So, when two deaf children get together from the village, their sign language will be mixed with Village sign and Israeli sign. Hearing children learn Village sign from deaf relatives at home and not in school, so they are unfamiliar with Israeli sign language. Chapters in Fox (2007) alternate between observations of Village Bedouins using Village sign and chapters on language and linguistics. The author tells of a Dublin School for the deaf that segregate boys from girls. As a result of the segregation, 70% of the signs are different. The authors explain that before Sandinistas taking power, deaf children grew up in isolation, so they were language impaired for the rest of their lives - having missed the threshold of time to learn a language. After the Sandinistas took power, education improved and deaf children attended school. Linguists report that the older children in the first cohort never learned Nicaragua Sign Language (NSL) adequately, but in the second cohort, children under age 7 enriched the rudimentary "language" they were given to create a bonafide language. Researchers were informed by other examples of Sign language. Thus, Fox (2007) takes on the roles of neurolinguists and psycholinguists in that they explain language in the brain, but also sociolinguists in that they explain deaf language in society as well as in culture and sub-cultures.

Historically, the idea of the sublime is often associated with grand and astounding natural scenery. This thesis investigates a twenty-first century idea of the sublime that includes dissonant phenomena such as ecosystem disruption and climate change. The subject of the sublime is symbolic of how unprepared the general audience is for dealing with the inherent disorders that arise when confronted with ‘negative’ aesthetic engagement. Landscape design, however, can mediate this experience to facilitate a creative act of imagination and identification with contemporary sublime phenomena. This in turn provides an opportunity to speculate on a future landscape architectural repertoire.

This is the galley proof of part 1 of my 3 part PhD dissertation.
It is published in an edited volume with Transcript Verlag. Page numbers may vary to the finished publication. To support the author(s), you can find the book digitally or as a hardcover under:
https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5278-9/die-emotionalisierung-des-politischen/

--
To the surprise of many and despite Hillary R. Clinton being the
clear favorite to win the 2016 U.S. election, Donald J. Trump
won the race for the Republican party. Trump’s campaign was
defined by “nationalistic” and “populist” narratives, following
a strategy of political marketing which was designed to
emotionalize the political discourse, in a quality usually
reserved for autocratic regimes (cf. Gillies 2018: 2). In this partsociological,
part-media communication and partneuroscientific
study I will be focusing on each candidate’s
argumentative structure as well as their employment of three
key emotional stimuli (sex, fear and violence) throughout their
public speeches, interviews and debates. The method applied
will be a qualitative discourse analysis based on the Pragmatic
Sociology of Critique (PSC) according to Boltanski and
Thévenot and will be further developed into a critical media
analysis method, serving as a flexible framework for analyzing
emotionalized political media content. By sociologically
examining the occurrence of these key emotional stimuli in
combination with (political) arguments, the study is
introducing established neuroscientific theories (regarding the
role of emotions within human attention- and memoryprocesses)
into the realm of media and communication
research. I strive to identify each campaign’s distinctive
argumentative pattern as well as to highlight the importance
of emotional stimuli within (political) communication and
especially populism. The general goal of the paper will be to
develop and introduce a neopragmatist method for media
research using the example of the 2016 U.S. electoral
communication. Additionally, the differences between
‘populist’ and ‘regular’ communication shall be discussed.

La Neurolinguistique Générale est sensée correspondre à la révision majeure de la Sémantique Générale qu'Alfred Korzybski a mentionnée à de nombreuses reprises comme devant se produire dans les 25 ans suivant sa disparition (1950), et qui en émerge naturellement lorsque la barrière mentale due à la certitude injustifiée que la réalité physique ne peut être confirmée avec certitude et ne peut être comprise objectivement est levée. Il est intéressant de noter que l'analyse menant à cette révision particulière a débuté dans les années 1970, c'est-à-dire dans le délai prévu par Korzybski, même si elle n'a pu être pleinement documentée et reliée à l'ensemble des références formelles requises que beaucoup plus tard, en raison du temps qu'il a fallu pour identifier, localiser et corréler chaque élément majeur de la solution pour aboutir à présente synthèse. Description sommaire de la Neurolinguistique Générale suivie d'une description sommaire de la Sémantique Générale qu'elle est sensée compléter. Analyse sommaire de l'influence de la motivation des individus, déterminée par leur sentiment d'insécurité et l'étendue de leurs bases de connaissances générales personnelles, dans l'établissement des structures sociales à travers l'histoire. Analyse sommaire des causes de la résistance historique de la communauté académique à l'introduction de nouveaux paradigmes fondateurs qui auraient pu être bénéfiques à la société. Identification de la relation entre l'étendue de la base de connaissances générales des individus et l'étendue du niveau de conscience sociale qui en résulte. Description sommaire du processus de compréhension et des propriétés du néocortex, dont l'utilisation coordonnée favorise l'acquisition de connaissances objectives.

Esta pesquisa tem como objetivo investigar a representação sintática do aspecto perfect. Assumiu-se a existência de tipos distintos de perfect: perfect universal / situação persistente, perfect existencial / resultativo, perfect existencial / experiencial e perfect existencial / passado recente. Para tanto, foi investigada uma possível perda linguística desse aspecto associado ao tempo presente em sujeitos portadores da Doença de Alzheimer, tanto na variante clássica (DA), quanto na variante frontal, conhecida como Afasia Progressiva Primária Logopênica (APPL). A metodologia elaborada para este trabalho consistiu na realização de um estudo duplo de caso, tendo participado uma paciente portadora da DA e outra da APPL, ambas falantes nativas do português do Brasil. Foram aplicados dois testes de funcionalidade, dois testes neuropsicológicos e dois testes linguísticos e foi realizada também uma análise de fala espontânea. Os resultados indicaram que ambas as pacientes apresentaram declínio funcional e comprometimento cognitivo, ainda que o déficit na paciente com DA fosse maior do que o da paciente com APPL. A análise referente à expressão linguística, resultante da comparação dos resultados dos dois testes linguísticos e da análise de fala espontânea, revelou que a paciente com DA apresentava um déficit que incide sobre os quatro tipos de perfect, tempo presente e aspecto imperfectivo, enquanto que a paciente com APPL apresentava um déficit que incide sobre perfect existencial / passado recente e tempo presente. Observou-se, então, que o perfect existencial / passado recente está dissociado na gramática mental, havendo um sintagma referente a esse conhecimento na representação sintática, o RecPerfP, que domina os demais sintagmas de perfect. Além disso, discutiu-se que TP encontra-se acima dos sintagmas de perfect na hierarquia sintática, ao passo que AspP encontra-se abaixo. Foi proposto, dessa forma, que a hierarquia entre sintagmas de perfect, tempo e aspecto perfectivo/imperfectivo na representação sintática seja a seguinte: TP > RecPerf > ExPerfP > UPerfP > ResPerfP > AspP. ////// Abstract: This research aims to investigate the syntactic representation of the perfect aspect. Different types of perfect were assumed to exist: universal perfect / persistent situation, existential perfect / resultative, existential perfect / experiential and existential perfect / recent past. Therefore, a possible linguistic impairment of this aspect associated with the present tense was investigated in subjects with Alzheimer's disease, both in the classic variant (AD) and in the frontal variant, known as Logopenic Primary Progressive Aphasia (LPPA). The methodology developed for this study consisted of a double case study, involving one patient with AD and one with LPPA, both Brazilian Portuguese native speakers. Two functionality tests, two neuropsychological tests and two language tests were applied and a spontaneous speech analysis was also performed. The results indicated that both patients presented functional decline and cognitive impairment, although the deficit in the AD patient was greater than that of the LPPA patient. The analysis of the linguistic expression, resulting from the comparison of the results of the two linguistic tests and the spontaneous speech analysis, revealed that the patient with AD presented a deficit that affects the four types of perfect, present tense and imperfective aspect, while the patient with LPPA had a deficit that affects existential perfect / recent past and present tense. It was observed, then, that the existential perfect / recent past is dissociated in mental grammar, and there is a phrase referring to this knowledge in syntactic representation, RecPerfP, which dominates the other perfect phrases. In addition, it has been argued that TP is above the perfect phrases in the syntactic hierarchy, whereas AspP is below. Thus, it was proposed that the hierarchy between perfect, tense and perfective / imperfective aspect phrases in syntactic representation is as follows: TP> RecPerf > ExPerfP > UPerfP > ResPerfP > AspP.