Investigating the Agrammatic Production of Canonical and Non-Canonical Sentences Cross-Linguistically

Mohammad Harun

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.11n.1p.6

Abstract

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT) and make more mistakes in producing non-canonical sentences compared to that of canonical sentences. The present research investigates the production impairments of canonical and non-canonical sentences cross-linguistically focusing on Bangla, Japanese, German and English aphasic patients. While Bangla, Japanese, German have relatively flexible word order, and hence allow freer phrasal movement, English exemplifies less freedom in word order patterns, and does not allow as much movement as the former three. We hypothesized that Bangla agrammatic patients would have more impairments in producing non-canonical sentences than those of canonical counterparts, while the production of canonical sentences is not completely devoid of impairments too. Primary data were collected from Bangla agrammatic patients, and secondary data from Japanese, German and English were exploited for cross-linguistic comparison. The findings show that Bangla agrammatic speakers have severe impairments in producing passive sentences, although the production of active ones are not completely devoid of impairments. The cross-linguistic comparison of the findings implies that the production of Bangla agrammatism tend to be similar to other agrammatic production and the production of non-canonical sentences are more difficult than those of canonical sentences cross-linguistically.

Highlights

Though Broca’s area is usually considered to be the language production area, production of linguistic items is not exclusively confined to this region
Primary data were collected from Bangla agrammatic patients, and secondary data from Japanese, German and English were exploited for cross-linguistic comparison
The findings show that Bangla agrammatic speakers have severe impairments in producing passive sentences, the production of active ones are not completely devoid of impairments

Summary

Introduction

Though Broca’s area is usually considered to be the language production area, production of linguistic items is not exclusively confined to this region. There is no 100% fine-grained interaction between area-division and language behavior. There have been many studies focusing on the functions of the different parts of the brain, and the severity of language impairments based on the damages in different parts of the brain studied. The studies include fMRI techniques, online, off-line language processing studies and others. Report that the sentence constructions that deviate from the basic word order are more difficult to process for agrammatic patients. As adult speakers over-learn the canonical sentences, they can produce the basic, canonical sentences comparatively . The previous research on agrammatism has reported that agrammatic speakers have specific types of language impairments

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