Year book of speech, language and hearing 1990: Edited by J.E. Bernthal, J.W. Hall, III and J.B. Tomblin. Mosby Year Book, St Louis, 1990, 282 pp

Abstract

The characteristics of Hungarian aphasics reflect the difference in the features of Hungarian as a Finnish-Ugric language. These features are the highly complex use of inflectional morphemes, which are concatenated, providing markers for several functions in one word. Hungarian aphasics were systematically studied for features of agrammatism in language output, as well as in comprehension. The results of these studies suggest that in Hungarian there is a direct mapping of inflectional markings to semantics. The competition between definite and conditional conjugation is a major source of error just like in French, as well as competition between first and third persons. Omission errors occurred frequently, especially among Broca's aphasics omitting the indirect objects and Wernicke's aphasics the direct objects. Broca's aphasics also showed a lower level of pronoun use and article omission. Omissions and substitutions amounted to telegraphic speech in some patients, although this is not as marked as in English because of the high rate of omission in normal Hungarian. Wernicke's aphasics tended to produce paraphasic nouns and pronouns with some errors in inflection. Vowel harmony in the inflections was particularly resistant to deficit. Studies of sentence comprehension revealed that subject-verb agreement cues were most affected in Wernicke's aphasics and animacy cues were the weakest in Broca's aphasics. Although word order is rather free in Hungarian, canonical word orders were used for interpretation by all aphasics.Systematic studies of comprehension in Hungarian aphasics show that phonemic contrasts in words are more sensitive than sound discrimination tasks. Higher levels of sentence processing are influenced by the availability of case marking suffixes, which are numerous in Hungarian.