Negation in agrammatism: a cross-linguistic comparison

Abstract

Negation is a concept that has hardly received attention in aphasia research. The present study describes the performance of agrammatic speakers of three different languages — English, Dutch and Norwegian — on a sentence comprehension and two sentence anagram tests. These languages have been chosen, because the structure of the negative sentence is different in terms of the internal structure of the negation phrase (NegP) and the position of this phrase in the syntactic tree. No difference in comprehension of negative and affirmative sentences is found. The results on the sentence construction tests, however, vary per language. The English agrammatics are worse than the Dutch and Norwegian in constructing negative, but not in positive sentences. It is suggested that it is the internal structure of NegP that influences agrammatic performance on a sentence construction task.