Inflectional marking in Hungarian aphasics

Abstract

How do aphasics deal with the rich inflectional marking available in agglutinative languages like Hungarian? For the Hungarian noun alone, aphasics have to deal with over 15 basic case markings and dozens of possible combinations of these basic markings. Using the picture description task of MacWhinney and Bates (1978), this study examined the use of inflectional markings in nine Broca's and five Wernicke's aphasic speakers of Hungarian. The analysis focused on subject, direct object, indirect object, and locative nominal arguments. Compared to normals, both groups had a much higher rate of omission of all argument types. Subject ellipsis was particularly strong, as it is in normal Hungarian. There was a tendency for Broca's to omit the indirect object and for Wernicke's to omit the direct object. Across argument types, Wernicke's had a much higher level of pronoun usage than did Broca's. Broca's also showed a very high level of article omission. Compared to similar data reported by Slobin (this issue) for Turkish, the Hungarian aphasics showed an elevated level of omission of case markings. Addition errors were quite rare, but there were 14 substitutions of one case marking for another. These errors all involved the substitution of some close semantic competitor. There were no errors in the basic rules for vowel harmony or morpheme order. Overall the results paint a picture of a group of individuals whose grammatical abilities are damaged and noisy, but still largely functional. Neither the view of Broca's as agrammatic nor the view of Wernicke's as paragrammatic was strongly supported.