Morphology In Aphasia Research Articles

Grammatical Morphology in Aphasia: Evidence from Cantonese Classifiers

Grammatical Morphology in Aphasia: Evidence from Cantonese Classifiers

Noun and Verb Morphology in Swahili Individuals with Aphasia

Noun and Verb Morphology in Swahili Individuals with Aphasia

Verbal Morphology in Aphasia: Comparison of Structured vs. Narrative Elicitation Tasks

Verbal Morphology in Aphasia: Comparison of Structured vs. Narrative Elicitation Tasks

Syntax and inflectional morphology in Aphasia: Quantitative aspects of Wernicke speakers’ narratives*

Aphasic language deficits are seen as gradient deviations from the nonpathological norms, and it has been claimed that persons suffering from posterior (Wernicke's) aphasia show little, if any syntactic aberrations. The present quantitative analysis of pathological syntactic patterns in Wernicke's aphasia deals with Finnish, a grammatically free word‐order language, but with a canonical SVO order. In contrast to the preservation of syntax hypothesis, the present persons with posterior aphasia show decreased syntactic complexity, operation‐alised through various structures, in their narratives.

Sensitivity to inflectional morphology in aphasia: A real-time processing perspective

The present study investigates Broca's aphasics' sensitivity to morphological information in an on-line task. German is used as the test language because it is highly inflected. Results from two word monitoring experiments show first that Broca's patients like normal controls are sensitive to the presence of a contextually incorrect inflection. Ćontrary to normals, they are, however, not sensitive to the absence of an obligatory inflection even when its presence is syntactically highly constrained. Second, they reveal that Broca's aphasics are only sensitive to the presence of an incorrect inflection when it functions as a marker of lexical category (noun vs. verb) and not when it functions as a diacritical marker (second person singular vs. third person singular). The results are taken as evidence for the claim that Broca's aphasics are impaired in the ability to process the full syntactic information encoded in closed class elements in a fast, automatic, and obligatory way.

Selective impairment of grammatical morphology due to induced stress in normal listeners: Implications for aphasia

The traditional clinical picture for English nonfluent aphasics has generally presented the deficit as one of total loss of control over grammatical morphology, with some sparing of word order. This is at odds with recent research involving nonfluent aphasic speakers of highly inflected languages, which has shown that agrammatic performance is characterized by morphological substitution rather than omission errors. If the deficit associated with focal brain damage cannot be adequately accounted for in syndrome-specific ways, we may need to look for language-specific processing explanations. One such explanation has to do with language-specific response to global processing difficulty. The current experiment is designed to study the effects of a stress-related limitation on morphological processing. Normal speakers of a language with a relatively rich morphological system (German) are compared with those of a comparatively impoverished system (English) on different forms of a sentence comprehension task. In one form, “clean” stimuli permit full reliance on all available cues to meaning in each language. In another test, a low-level noise mask partially obscured the stimulus sentences. English speakers, who rely almost exclusively on word order cues, were not affected by the noise manipulation. German speakers relied heavily on morphological and semantic information rather than on word order under “clean” conditions. However, under noise Germans made significantly less use of grammatical morphology, with a trend toward compensatory reliance on word order. The results indicate that a global reduction in processing capacity can affect some aspects of language more than others and suggest that such factors must be taken into account in trying to understand specific impairment of morphology in aphasia.

Selective impairment of italian grammatical morphology in the congenially deaf: A case study

Abstract Z is a congenitally deaf woman who has acquired an extraordinarily high level of competence in Italian, a spoken language with a rich system of inflectional morphology. Examples of Z's spoken and written language are compared with equivalent samples for an educated native speaker (NC) and a second control subject (BC) who acquired Italian as a second language. Like NC and BC, Z produces complex and well-formed syntactic constructions. Unlike BC, Z also demonstrates near-normal levels of lexical competence (in word selection, spelling, derivational morphology). By contrast, Z displays severe impairments in grammatical morphology. Her pattern of morphological impairment is also qualitatively different from that of our bilingual control: violations of bound morphology are restricted almost entirely to long-distance agreement; most errors involve omission, addition, or substitution of free-standing function words. Results are discussed in terms of a possible causal link between phonetic/phonological deprivation and problems with grammatical morphology. Some models proposed to account for loss of morphology in aphasia are discussed, and we conclude that these models cannot account for the unique profile of grammatical impairment displayed by the deaf.

Grammatical Morphology in Aphasia: A Case of Errata or Reader Misinterpretations?

As convincing as the discussion presented by Elizabeth Bates, Angela Friederici and Beverly Wulfeck on grammatical morphology in aphasia in three languages may seem, we were at loss when trying to reconstruct the quantitative basis of their argumentation (see Bates et al., 1987, Grammatical morphology in aphasia: Evidence from three languages. Cortex, 23: 545-575). With the present notice we would like to lessen the possibility of reader misinterpretations that may easily confuse the thread of the argument of this article in the form in which it was originally presented.

Grammatical Morphology in Aphasia: A Reply to Niemi et al.

Grammatical Morphology in Aphasia: A Reply to Niemi et al.

Grammatical Morphology in Aphasia: Evidence from Three Languages

Aspects of grammatical morphology in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia were elicited under controlled conditions in three language groups: English, Italian and German. Results suggest that the agrammatism/paragrammatism distinction does not work well for richly-inflected languages. Language-specific ratios of closed class morphology were preserved even among non-fluent patients, with significantly more morphology produced by German and Italian patients. German and Italian patients were also much more likely to furnish the article before nouns - despite or perhaps because of the fact that articles are more complex and informative in those languages. Although patients assigned the correct article most of the time, there were a significant number of article errors (i.e. paragrammatic substitution). Error analyses showed that substitutions are not random, reflecting difficulty in access rather than loss. Substitutions were more common in German, where the complex case and gender markings on the article increase the probability of error. Within each language, error patterns were quite similar for Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics. However, at a detailed level patient group differences in error production were detected. German Broca's aphasics tend to avoid difficult case forms by substituting a simpler, less-marked morphosyntactic frame. Wernicke's aphasics try instead to.produce the more marked, oblique constructions, resulting in a less conservative error pattern.