Achievement

Neural evidence was shown to support an abstract syntactic hypothesis positing a deep distinction between sentences like 'John follows Mary' and 'John is behind Mary'. In the former, the subject 'John' is bound to the predicate 'follows Mary' by the verb 'follows'. In the latter, the binding of 'John' to the predicate 'behind Mary' is mediated by an abstract syntactic element called Pred: not by 'is', itself not a true verb. (In many languages, Pred corresponds to no word at all.) Does the brain have two distinct processes, one in which a verb binds a subject to a predicate, the other in which Pred serves this function? Two IGERT core faculty, linguist Kyle Rawlins and neuropsychologist Brenda Rapp, collaborated with Michele Miozzo (Columbia) to show that following stroke, patients suffered damage to the latter process, while the former was left intact: the patients correctly use sentences like 'John follows Mary' but are impaired in their use of sentences like 'John is behind Mary'.