Assigning linguistic roles: Sentence interpretation in normal and aphasic Kannada-English bilinguals

Abstract

In interpreting a sentence, listeners rely on a variety of linguistic cues to assign grammatical roles such as agent and patient. In normal sentence comprehension these cues converge to enable sentence interpretation, yet when the cues are placed in competition they are differentially used by speakers. The present study investigated the relative strength of three cues to agenthood — word order, noun animacy and subject-verb agreement — in normal and aphasic Kannada-English bilinguals and Kannada monolingual controls. The findings are discussed with respect to other crosslinguistic evidence using the sentence interpretation paradigm and with respect to their bearing on theories of bilingual language representation.