A Neural Dissociation within Language: Evidence that the Mental Dictionary Is Part of Declarative Memory, and that Grammatical Rules Are Processed by the Procedural System

@article{Ullman1997AND,
  title={A Neural Dissociation within Language: Evidence that the Mental Dictionary Is Part of Declarative Memory, and that Grammatical Rules Are Processed by the Procedural System},
  author={Michael T. Ullman and Suzanne Corkin and Marie Coppola and Gregory Hickok and John Growdon and Walter J. Koroshetz and Steven Pinker},
  journal={Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience},
  year={1997},
  volume={9},
  pages={266-276}
}
Language comprises a lexicon for storing words and a grammar for generating rule-governed forms. Evidence is presented that the lexicon is part of a temporal-parietalhnedial-temporal declarative memory system and that granlmatical rules are processed by a frontamasal-ganglia procedural system. Patients produced past tenses of regular and novel verbs (looked and plagged), which require an -ed-suffixation rule, and irregular verbs (dug), which are retrieved from memory. Word-finding difficulties… 
View on MIT Press
dash.harvard.edu
750 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
76
Background Citations
344
Methods Citations
49
Results Citations
82

750 Citations

Neural correlates of lexicon and grammar: Evidence from the production, reading, and judgment of inflection in aphasia

The role of the striatum in sentence processing: Evidence from a priming study in early stages of Huntington's disease

Naming Tools and Using Rules : Evidence That a Frontal / Basal-Ganglia System Underlies both Motor Skill Knowledge and Grammatical Rule Use

We investigated the hypothesis that two well-studied brain systems (see Feinberg & Farah, 1997) underlie the lexicon/grammar dichotomy (Ullman et al., 1997). In this view, frontal/basal-ganglia…

Facts, Events, and Inflection: When Language and Memory Dissociate

TLDR
Two brain-damaged patients who show contrasting patterns of deficits in memory and language functioning reveal that the retrieval of irregular inflections proceeds relatively autonomously with respect to declarative memory.

The Declarative/Procedural Model of Lexicon and Grammar

  • M. Ullman
  • Psychology
    Journal of psycholinguistic research
  • 2001
TLDR
It is argued that converging evidence from studies that use a range of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches with children and adults supports the declarative/procedural model of lexicon and grammar.

The role of declarative and procedural memory in disorders of language

TLDR
The evidence suggests that declarative and procedural memory play critical roles in language disorders, as well as in language more generally.

The basal ganglia and rule-governed language use: evidence from vascular and degenerative conditions.

TLDR
Investigating whether striatal damage or loss of its dopaminergic innervation is reliably associated with selective regular past tense deficits in patients with subcortical cerebrovascular damage, Parkinson's disease or Huntington's disease found no evidence of a consistent association, suggesting that the basal ganglia are not essential for processing theregular past tense as a sequence of morphemes, either in comprehension or production.

The neural basis of lexicon and grammar in first and second language: the declarative/procedural model

Theoretical and empirical aspects of the neural bases of the mental lexicon and the mental grammar in first and second language (L1 and L2) are discussed. It is argued that in L1, the learning,…

Contributions of memory circuits to language: the declarative/procedural model

On the processing of regular and irregular forms of verbs and nouns: evidence from neuropsychology

  • M. Miozzo
  • Psychology, Linguistics
    Cognition
  • 2003
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 102 REFERENCES

Neurolinguistic features of spontaneous language production dissociate three forms of neurodegenerative disease: Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's

  • J. Illes
  • Psychology, Linguistics
    Brain and Language
  • 1989

Neuropsychological evidence for multiple implicit memory systems: a comparison of Alzheimer's, Huntington's, and Parkinson's disease patients

TLDR
The results for the PD patients suggest that the demented PD patients have endured damage to the neurologic systems subserving both motor learning and lexical priming.

German Inflection: The Exception That Proves the Rule

TLDR
This work finds 21 circumstances for regular past tense formation, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words; in every case, people inflect them regularly and are evidence for a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.

The Selective Impairment of Semantic Memory

  • E. Warrington
  • Psychology
    The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology
  • 1975
TLDR
Evidence is presented that this impairment of semantic memory cannot be accounted for by intellectual impairment, sensory or perceptual deficits, or expressive language disorder, and some tentative evidence for the structural basis for a hierarchically organized modality-specific semantic memory system is discussed.

On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition

Dissociations of language function in dementia: A case study

Sentence comprehension in Parkinson's disease: The role of attention and memory

Rules, representations, and the English past tense

Answering the connectionist challenge: a symbolic model of learning the past tenses of English verbs

Procedural memory in Parkinson's disease: impaired motor but not visuoperceptual learning.

TLDR
The results showed that PD patients were not impaired on mirror reading or paired associate learning, and the underlying processes/procedures for procedural learning are specific to the task, and are supported by different neuroanatomical systems.
...