Sentence Types Research Articles

Analysis of Stylistic Aspects of the Appearance of Ellipsis in Speech

In this article, an attempt was made to trace the history of learning elliptical sentences in Uzbek and English, to distinguish the most common structural and semantic types, and to study the comparative analysis of these types of sentences in these languages. If we take into account the current state of the study of elliptical sentences, we should note that there is no generally accepted definition of elliptical sentences, the lack of clarity of the characteristic features of these sentences, and the absence of a unified approach to the typology of elliptical sentences. Despite the fact that a sufficient number of works have been devoted to elliptic sentences, currently the problem of ellipsis can be classified as understudied, and the prospects for studying this issue are wide and in demand.

Kalimat Tanya pada Percakapan Tokoh Utama dalam Noveltoon Kulepas Kau Dengan Bismillah Karya D'wie

The aim of this research is to describe the types of interrogative sentences in the NovelToon Kulepas Kau dengan Bismillah by D'wie. The research method used in this research is descriptive qualitative by describing the use of interrogative sentences in the conversation of the main character in the NovelToon Kulepas Kau with Bismillah. The results of this research include four types of question sentences, there are 196 ordinary question sentences, 17 rhetorical question sentences, 58 disguised question sentences, and 89 clarifying questions. Of the four types of question sentences, 361 quotations were found, the most dominant type of question sentence used in NovelToon Kulepas Kau dengan Bismillah by D'wie was a regular question sentence which appeared 196 times, while rhetorical question sentences with 17 quotations were the most common type of question sentence. appeared a little. The reason why there are more ordinary interrogative sentences in D'wie's NovelToon Kulepas Kau dengan Bismillah is because ordinary interrogative sentences are often used to obtain information directly, often appear in everyday communication, and have a simple structure. Meanwhile, rhetorical question sentences are used less often because they aim to express feelings without requiring an answer.

Investigating on Humanistic Quality Education in Medical Schools in Shandong Province as Basis for Proposed Management Intervention Program

This study aims to understand the content, methods and effective implementation strategies of humanistic education in medical colleges in Shandong Province, to construct a process model of humanistic education in medical colleges in Shandong Province, and finally to propose a management intervention plan. This study adopted a multiple case study method, and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 4 humanistic education teachers, 3 medical students and 3 managers from three medical colleges in Shandong Province through purposive sampling and snowballing methods. This study used the basic ideas of grounded theory to conduct thematic analysis of the interview data. This study conducted open coding, screened typical sentences from the interviewees' answers, extracted keywords from the typical sentences; then the keywords were classified and sorted to further extract relevant information such as the content, methods, and implementation strategies of humanistic education in higher medical colleges. The research results show that the humanities education in medical schools in Shandong Province has a certain foundation, but there are still some shortcomings. In addition, the study proposed four (4) concepts, namely: humanistic leadership in medical schools, strengthening humanistic guidance, strengthening the humanistic development of medical students, and cultivating and nurturing students' humanistic qualities. Furthermore, the findings also indicated the positive impact of empathy, communication skills, and cultural awareness, which highlights the importance of integrating humanities into medical education to develop well-rounded, compassionate healthcare professionals of the future.Based on the findings, a management intervention plan is hereby proposed.

Influences of Attentional Focus on Across- and Within-Sentence Variability in Adults Who Do and Do Not Stutter.

Research has found an advantage to maintaining an external attentional focus while speaking as an increase in accuracy and a decrease in across-sentence variability has been found when producing oral-motor and speech tasks. What is not clear is how attention affects articulatory variability both across and within sentences, or how attention affects articulatory control in speakers who stutter. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of an internal versus external attention focus on articulatory variability at the sentence level. This study used linear (spatial-temporal index [STI]) and nonlinear (recurrence quantification analysis [RQA]) indices to measure lip aperture variability in 10 adults who stutter (AWS) and 15 adults who do not stutter (ANS) while they repeated sentences under an internal versus external attentional focus, virtual reality task (withVR.app; retrieved December 2023 from https://therapy.withvr.app). Four RQA measures were used to calculate within sentence variability including percent recurrence, percent determinism (%DET), stability (MAXLINE), and stationarity (TREND). Sentence duration measures were also obtained. AWS' movement durations were significantly longer than those of the ANS across conditions, and the AWS were more affected by the attentional focus shifts as their speech rate significantly increased when speaking with an external focus. AWS' speech patterns were also significantly more deterministic (%DET) and stable (MAXLINE) across attentional focus conditions compared to those of the ANS. Both groups showed an effect from attentional shifts as they exhibited less variability (i.e., more consistent) across sentences (STI) and less determinism (%DET) and stability (MAXLINE) within sentences when repeating sentences under an external attentional focus. STI values were not significantly different between the AWS and ANS for the internal or external attentional focus tasks. There were no significant main effects for group or condition for TREND; however, a main effect for sentence type was found. Results suggest that AWS use a more restrictive and less flexible approach to movement and that an external focus fosters more flexibility and thus responsiveness to external factors.

DHH and L2 college students' knowledge of English resultatives and depictives.

College-level deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students and hearing students of English as a Second Language (L2) along with hearing native speakers (NS) of English were assessed in their knowledge of English resultative and depictive sentences. In "Kevin wiped the table clean," the resultative phrase "clean" indicates that the table became clean as a result of Kevin wiping it. In "Megan drove the car drunk," the depictive phrase "drunk" describes Megan's state throughout the entire event of driving. Findings of a sentence-acceptability rating scale task revealed higher performance by the NS group compared to the DHH and L2 groups, whose near-equivalent performance improved with increasing overall English proficiency. Participants exhibited higher performance on active, passive, and unaccusative resultative sentences than on ungrammatical unergative resultatives and higher performance on grammatical than ungrammatical depictive sentence types. These findings contribute new insights into the comparative study of English acquisition by DHH and L2 learners.

Types of conjunction usage

This article is devoted to subordinating conjunctions, in particular conditional and causal conjunctions, which have two semantic valences - the valence of condition or cause and the valence of effect. These conjunctions can be used in two types of sentences: in sentences where both valences of conjunctions are expressed explicitly, and in sentences where one of the valences is not expressed. At the same time, the content of the valence can be information related to different levels of the semantics of the sentence - to the propositional and to the pragmatic levels. The propositional level is formed by information about the situation called by the sentence, and the pragmatic level consists of meanings reflecting various aspects of the speech situation. The pragmatic level, in particular, includes such semantic components as illocutionary, epistemic and metatextual. Thus, the subject of the study is the types of conjunctions usage, distinguished depending on how their valences are expressed and what their content is. When describing the constructions, we used the method that is applied to the analysis of linguistic units expressing various subjective meanings. This method consists in explicating the features of the speech situation related to the use of a given language unit (the speaker's evaluation of the denoted situation, information about it or his/her own utterance) and taking them into account when characterizing its meaning. The novelty of this study lies in the systematic approach to the analysis of subordinating conjunctions, which is based on the identification and classification of their usage depending on the level of semantic relations. Thus, in sentences with subordinating conjunctions (especially conditional and causal conjunctions) the valences of conjunctions differ in the way of expression and the level of semantics. This allows us to distinguish four types of conjunctions usage: propositional, illocutionary, epistemic and metatextual.

Online Eye Tracking for Aphasia: A Feasibility Study Comparing Web and Lab Tracking and Implications for Clinical Use.

Studies using eye-tracking methodology have made important contributions to the study of language disorders such as aphasia. Nevertheless, in clinical groups especially, eye-tracking studies often include small sample sizes, limiting the generalizability of reported findings. Online, webcam-based tracking offers a potential solution to this issue, but web-based tracking has not been compared with in-lab tracking in past studies and has never been attempted in groups with language impairments. Patients with post-stroke aphasia (n=16) and age-matched controls (n=16) completed identical sentence-picture matching tasks in the lab (using an EyeLink system) and on the web (using WebGazer.js), with the order of sessions counterbalanced. We examined whether web-based eye tracking is as sensitive as in-lab eye tracking in detecting group differences in sentence processing. Patients were less accurate and slower to respond to all sentence types than controls. Proportions of gazes to the target and foil picture were computed in 100ms increments, which showed that the two modes of tracking were comparably sensitive to overall group differences across different sentence types. Web tracking showed comparable fluctuations in gaze proportions to target pictures to lab tracking in most analyses, whereas a delay of approximately 500-800ms appeared in web compared to lab data. Web-based eye tracking is feasible to study impaired language processing in aphasia and is sensitive enough to detect most group differences between controls and patients. Given that validations of webcam-based tracking are in their infancy and how transformative this method could be to several disciplines, much more testing is warranted.

A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Phrase Structure and Subject Island Violations.

In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. To facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using ERPs. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.

The influence of pragmatic function on children's comprehension of complex because- and if-sentences

IntroductionIn complex adverbial sentences, the connectives because and if can perform different pragmatic functions (e.g. Content, Speech-Act), although this is often overlooked in studies investigating children's acquisition of these connectives. In this study, we investigated whether pragmatic variation is responsible for some of the difficulty young children have in understanding because- and if-sentences and tested the extent to which patterns of acquisition are related to the cognitive complexity or input frequency of the different pragmatic types.MethodsNinety-two children (aged 3–5; F = 39) and 20 adults (F = 12) took part in a forced-choice picture task where they had to identify correct pictures after hearing Content and Speech-Act because- and if-sentences.ResultsResults showed that children were most accurate on the sentence type where cognitive simplicity and input frequency converge (If Content), but this pattern was largely driven by the girls in the study. For response times, children were fastest with the least cognitively complex sentence types. However, for because Speech-Act sentences, there was an inverse relationship between response time and input frequency.DiscussionTaken together, these findings suggest that neither account (cognitive complexity or input frequency) can fully explain the findings. Instead, we suggest that the relative contributions of both factors are best understood in terms of the relevance of these utterances to children and the precise contexts in which children hear these utterances produced.

A Study of Chinese Translation of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language from the Perspective of Grammatical Metaphor

In Systemic Functional Linguistics, grammatical metaphor is categorized into ideational and interpersonal types. Translation, as a process of code-switching, involves choosing between congruent and metaphorical forms, each serving different communicative purposes. Distinguishing these forms clarifies their distinct functions. This paper explores the use and importance of grammatical metaphors in translating The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language based on the author’s independent translation practice. Given this, the study achieves three objectives through quantitative and qualitative analysis: (1) examining the distribution of grammatical metaphors in the translation of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language; (2) exploring the reasons behind their emergence; and (3) analyzing the role these metaphors play in the translation. Translation strategies were classified into two types based on the retention of grammatical metaphors: congruent translation, which simplifies the text and reduces metaphors, and metaphorical translation, which sustains a formal, academic, and concise style. The study reveals that the same translation techniques can be applied across various word, sentence, and text types, with different contexts requiring different methods even for identical grammatical and semantic units. Regardless of whether metaphors are retained, it is essential to ensure faithfulness, fluency, and aesthetics of the translation. Translators should avoid rigid application and decide on metaphor preservation based on the specific context and text type to best convey the original meaning.

Grammatical systematicity of request models in the modern Russian

The article analyzes the grammatical systematicity of models of request expression in modern Russian language. The relevance is determined by the need to identify the grammatical systematicity of the use of syntactic models of different types in expressing a request in Russian speech practice. The aim of the paper is to study syntactic models of request expression in modern Russian language in the aspect of the theory of communicative-pragmatic complexes. The study is conducted on the material representing different contexts of request usage: samples from modern Russian plays by famous playwrighters – A. Vampilov, N. Lakutin, E. Shabalina and A. Yablonskaya, as well as samples from the National Corpus of the Russian Language (NCLR) are used. Research methods: systematic, comparative, functional, contextual, structural-grammatical. Special attention is paid to the phenomenon of systematicity of syntactic models. The peculiarity of expressing the request by the models of sentences on the purpose of utterance – inductive, interrogative and narrative – is shown. The authors come to the conclusion about the peculiarity of linguistic conceptualization of request in three communicative situations – everyday request, official request, request when communicating in an unfamiliar environment, which differ in their communicative role and situations of use. The regularities of use of three types of sentences on the purpose of utterance depending on communicative situations are established. It is shown that the model of inductive sentences serves as the basic and most common grammatical form of expressing a request and is usually used in the communicative situation of a household request. Due to its special communicative characteristics, this model can also be used in the situation of communication with strangers, and with the use of grammatical extensions - and in some situations of official communication. The second most frequent type - interrogative sentences - is usually used when addressing strangers; as a rule, it is accompanied by politeness markers. Models of narrative sentences are used much less frequently than sentences of the other two types; they are most often used in situations of official communication.

Syntactic comprehension abilities in aged people with mild cognitive impairment

ABSTRACT Background Language studies in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have been primarily focused on lexicosemantic abilities, with a paucity of data regarding syntactic processing. Aims We aimed to verify the sentence comprehension ability of older adults with amnestic MCI (aMCI), non-amnestic MCI (naMCI), and mild AD and compare it to the performance of cognitively healthy older adults. Methods & Procedures We evaluated 32 cognitively healthy older adults, 22 with aMCI, 43 with naMCI, and 12 with mild AD using the Test for Reception of Grammar Version 2 (TROG-2). Outcomes & Results There were significant differences between the control and MCI and control and AD groups in the total number of correct answers and among the four groups’ profiles according to the type of sentence (p < 0.05). Zero anaphor, pronoun gender/number, and centre-embedded sentences discriminated at least between two groups (p < 0.05). Conclusions Poorer performance in sentences structurally more complex was in line with the severity of the cognitive decline, which may point to the effect of increased demands on working memory and executive functions on syntactic processing.

Ravens and Strawberries: Remarks on Hempel’s and Ramsey’s Accounts of laws and scientific explanation

Hempel never met Ramsey, but he knew his work. In his 1958 The Theoretician’s Dilemma: a study in the logic of theory construction, Hempel introduces the term Ramsey sentence, referring to Ramsey’s attempt in Theories to get rid of theoretical terms in formal accounts of scientific theories. In this paper, I draw the attention to another connection between Ramsey’s and Hempel’s works. Hempel’s Deductive-Nomological (DN) account of scientific explanation resembles very closely Ramsey’s account of a certain type of conditional sentences. In the first part of the paper, by introducing a fictional story, I highlight the similarities and differences between the two. In the last part of the paper, I claim that the most relevant difference between Ramsey and Hempel can be used to offer original solutions to Hempel’s Raven Paradox. Two possibilities are presented, arguing that the second, which requires a reconsideration of the formalisation of laws, is the most promising.

The Analysis of Compound Sentence Formation in Moon Jae-In's Posts on Social Media Instagram: An Effort to Increase Writing Skills of Korean Language Education Students UPI

This research is on the formation of compound sentences in Korean, as seen from the uploads on Instagram of former South Korean President Moon Jae-in. On his Instagram, Moon Jae-in uploads photos, videos, and writings containing ideas and responses to things. Researchers see the need to develop writing skills in the Korean Language Education Study Program FPBS UPI. Therefore, the researcher wants to see how Korean speakers form compound sentences according to Korean grammar. As a president, Moon Jae-in is considered able to write in Korean grammar so that it does not cause ambiguity and misunderstanding. The research data found 76 posts by Moon Jae-in and 267 compound sentences. This study also classifies these compound sentences into two classifications, namely 내포문 [nae-pho-mun] 'embedded clause' and 접속문 [jeop-sok-mun] 'conjunctive sentence.' The analysis results show two categories of compound sentence formation patterns in Moon Jae-in's writings: patterns of stacked and non-stacked compound sentence formation. After the analysis was completed, the researcher concluded three strategies for learning to write, namely 1) Students must be able to determine the type of sentence to be made; 2) Students must pay attention to sentence patterns in Korean; and 3) Learners must be careful in choosing the correct grammar.

Adductor Laryngeal Dystonia Versus Muscle Tension Dysphonia: Examining the Utility of Automated Acoustic Analysis to Detect Task Dependency as a Distinguishing Feature.

Differentiating adductor laryngeal dystonia (ADLD) and primary muscle tension dysphonia (pMTD) can be challenging. Unlike pMTD, ADLD is described as "task-dependent" with voiced phonemes purportedly provoking greater sign expression than voiceless phonemes. We evaluated the ability of two automated acoustic measures, the Cepstral Spectral Index of Dysphonia (CSID) and creak, to detect task dependency and to discriminate ADLD and pMTD. CSID, % creak, and listener ratings of dysphonia severity were obtained from audio recordings of patients with ADLD (n = 29) or pMTD (n = 33) reading two sentences loaded with either voiced or voiceless phonemes. Group × Sentence Type interaction effects confirmed that both "normalized" CSID and % creak detected task-dependent sign expression in ADLD (i.e., worse symptoms on the voiced- vs. voiceless-loaded sentence). However, a stepwise binary logistic regression analysis with group (ADLD vs. pMTD) as the dependent variable and % creak and normalized CSID variables (voiced, voiceless, and voiced vs. voiceless difference) as covariates revealed that the normalized CSID voiceless-laden sentence z score was the only significant predictor of group membership. Estimates of diagnostic precision from the normalized CSID voiceless sentence z scores were superior to % creak or listener ratings. Finally, the CSID possessed the strongest correlations with listener severity ratings regardless of group or sentence type. Although both normalized CSID and % creak detected task-dependent performance as a distinguishing feature of ADLD, a CSID profile wherein (a) the voiceless sentence z score was less severe than the voiced sentence and (b) the normalized voiceless sentence z score was within approximately 2 SDs (or less) of typical expectations provided the best estimates of diagnostic precision. Automated acoustic measures such as the CSID and creak provide useful information to objectively discriminate ADLD and pMTD.

An fMRI study of phrase structure and subject island violations.

In principle, functional neuroimaging provides uniquely informative data in addressing linguistic questions, because it can indicate distinct processes that are not apparent from behavioral data alone. This could involve adjudicating the source of unacceptability via the different patterns of elicited brain responses to different ungrammatical sentence types. However, it is difficult to interpret brain activations to syntactic violations. Such responses could reflect processes that have nothing intrinsically related to linguistic representations, such as domain-general executive function abilities. In order to facilitate the potential use of functional neuroimaging methods to identify the source of different syntactic violations, we conducted an fMRI experiment to identify the brain activation maps associated with two distinct syntactic violation types: phrase structure (created by inverting the order of two adjacent words within a sentence) and subject islands (created by extracting a wh-phrase out of an embedded subject). The comparison of these violations to control sentences surprisingly showed no indication of a generalized violation response, with almost completely divergent activation patterns. Phrase structure violations seemingly activated regions previously implicated in verbal working memory and structural complexity in sentence processing, whereas the subject islands appeared to activate regions previously implicated in conceptual-semantic processing, broadly defined. We review our findings in the context of previous research on syntactic and semantic violations using event-related potentials. Although our results suggest potentially distinct underlying mechanisms underlying phrase structure and subject island violations, our results are tentative and suggest important methodological considerations for future research in this area.

Syntactic Parallelism in Muglan

This article explores the syntactic parallelism in Mulan. The data are carried out from the secondary sources. The qualitative and descriptive method is used for analysis. The sixteen sentences are taken from the source and their targets were noted along with the transliteration. The selected sentences were analyzed on the basis of structure, functions and voice. On the basis of syntactic parallelism, the findings have been drawn on the basis of voice, sentence types and sentence function. Most of the Nepali active voices in the source text (ST) have been translated into English active voices in the target text (TT). Therefore, the tendency of active (ST) into active (TT) was very high. Throughout the sampled data, Nepali passive voice (ST) into English passive voice (TT) has very low. Similarly on the basis of sentence types, simple sentences in the ST translated into simple sentences in the TT has higher tendency as compared to compound sentences in the ST translated into compound sentences in the TT. The complex sentences in the ST translated into complex sentences in the TT have highest tendency. Likewise on the basis of sentence function, the declarative sentences in the ST into declarative sentences in the TT has highest tendency. Interrogative sentences in the ST into interrogative sentences in the TT has higher tendency than exclamatory sentences in the ST into exclamatory in the TT.The imperative sentence (ST) into imperative sentence (TT) has lowest tendency.

Structural types of sentences in Kosovo police communication centers

In this paper it will be analyzed grammatical and dialectal aspect of structural sentences of Albanian language used in six Kosovo Police Communication Centers. This paper includes: types of sentences used in Communication Centers separately; enhancing sentences, declarative sentences, declarative-exclamatory sentences and declarative-imperative; imperative sentences; - affirmative and negative sentences. All sections of this paper are illustrated with tables and charts, including number of used sentences and percentage of usage, to present the current situation of use of structural types of sentences in the Kosovo Police Communication Centers. Based on the results from six Communication Centers, which we have analyzed and treated separately, we have come to conclusions of the analysis of the grammatical and dialectal aspects. In Kosovo Police Communication Centers, within the category of declarative sentences, we find positive and negative sentences, which are formed by positive and negative particles, as: Poziiv (Positive), Negativ (Negative), Negativ niher (Negative for now), Po (Yes), Jo (No), veç çka po vrehet n’pamje t’jashtme (only what can be seen from outside), etc. In six Kosovo Police Communication Centers, the affirmative sentences are mainly formed through affirmative particles, as: pozitiv (positive), pranim (copy), po, po – po (yes, yeas – yes), u ba (done), ani faleminderit (OK thank you), n’rregull (alright), e kjart osht n’rregull (it’s clear alright), u kry (done), etc.

Syntactic Study of Essays by Grade VII Junior High School Students Undiksha Singaraja Laboratory

The study of seventh grade students' essays at Undiksha Singaraja Laboratory School is important to understand the use of sentence types, sentence unity, and sentence structure. This study aims to describe (1) sentence types, (2) sentence unity, and (3) sentence structure in students' essays. The data collection method used document recording and was analyzed qualitatively. The results showed that students used 107 single sentences and 99 compound sentences, reflecting a balance between the two. Sentence unity is shown by 186 sentences that have clear subject-predicate relationships, while there are 11 sentences without subjects and predicates, 8 sentences only contain predicates, and 1 sentence only has a subject. The varied sentence structures show the students' ability to construct sentences well. This research not only improves the understanding of students' writing ability, but also contributes to the field of syntax with insights into sentence formation and coherence among junior high school students

Sentence comprehension in Malay-speaking adults with aphasia: the role of affix integration

ABSTRACT Background One of the impairments in comprehension mostly reported for aphasia is that in reversible passive sentences, where a systematic asymmetry with reversible active sentences has been attested across languages. In several accounts, this selective impairment has been proposed to be the result of the specific syntax of passive sentences. However, some results particularly from flexible word order languages suggest that a pattern where both active and passive sentences are impaired also exists. Aims In this study, we examined the actives and passives in the comprehension of a flexible word order language, namely standard Malay, in people with aphasia (PWA), aiming to confirm that the predominant pattern in this language is one of generalised impairment across reversible sentences (active and passive), and not an asymmetrical one. The role of fluency in determining the pattern of impairment was also explored. Methods & procedures Fourteen healthy adults and 20 PWA, 14 with fluent aphasia and 6 with non-fluent aphasia, took part in a comprehension study in standard Malay. Standard Malay is a flexible word order language that relies on the parsing of the voice affix on the verb to correctly interpret both active and passive sentences. Participants were tested on a sentence-picture matching task on comprehension of active and passive reversible clauses. Outcomes and results The study revealed that PWA were overall less accurate than healthy speakers in comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences, and non-fluent PWA were less accurate than fluent PWA with no effect of sentence type (active/passive). While not predominant, an asymmetric pattern was present in some participants. We propose that an impairment in thematic role assignment leads to a generalised impairment in comprehension of reversible sentences, while preserved thematic role mapping and impaired syntax lead to an asymmetric impairment. Conclusions The study confirmed that speakers of Malay mostly show a generalised impairment in both active and passive sentences. Given the nature of the language, we propose that this suggests that impairment in Malay is predominantly shown on affix integration, first in mapping of thematic roles, and then in the full syntactic processing.