RECURSIVE SUBSYSTEMS IN APHASIA AND 1 ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE : 2 CASE STUDIES IN SYNTAX AND THEORY OF MIND

Bánréti, Zoltán and Hoffmann, Ildikó and Vincze, Veronika (2015) RECURSIVE SUBSYSTEMS IN APHASIA AND 1 ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE : 2 CASE STUDIES IN SYNTAX AND THEORY OF MIND. FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY. ISSN 1664-1078 (Submitted)

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Abstract

Abstract The relationship between recursive sentence embedding and theory-of-mind (ToM) inference 48 is investigated in 3 persons with Broca’s aphasia, 2 persons with Wernicke’s aphasia, and 6 49 persons with mild and moderate Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We asked questions of four types 50 about photographs of various real-life situations. Type 4 questions asked participants about 51 intentions, thoughts, or utterances of the characters in the pictures (“What may X be thinking / 52 asking Y to do?”). The expected answers typically involved subordinate clauses introduced by 53 conjunctions or direct quotations of the characters’ utterances. Broca’s aphasics did not produce 54 answers with recursive sentence embedding. Rather, they projected themselves into the 55 characters’ mental states and gave direct answers in the first person singular, with relevant ToM 56 content. We call such replies ‘situative statements’. Where the question concerned the mental 57 state of the character but did not require an answer with sentence embedding (“What does X 58 hate?”), aphasics gave descriptive answers rather than situative statements. Most replies given 59 by persons with AD to Type 4 questions were grammatical instances of recursive sentence 60 embedding. They also gave a few situative statements but the ToM content of these was 61 irrelevant. In more than one third of their well-formed sentence embeddings, too, they conveyed 62 irrelevant ToM contents. Persons with moderate AD were unable to pass secondary false belief 63 tests. 64 The results reveal double dissociation: Broca’s aphasics are unable to access recursive 65 sentence embedding but they can make appropriate ToM inferences; moderate AD persons 66 make the wrong ToM inferences but they are able to access recursive sentence embedding. The 67 double dissociation may be relevant for the nature of the relationship between the two recursive 68 capacities. Broca’s aphasics compensated for the lack of recursive sentence embedding by 69 recursive ToM reasoning represented in very simple syntactic forms: they used one recursive 70 subsystem to stand in for another recursive subsystem.

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