Syntactic Disorders Research Articles

Language Disorders Suffered by Cerebral Palsy Character in “Margarita, with a Straw” Movie

This research entitled “Language Disorders Suffered by Cerebral Palsy Character in Margarita, with a Straw Movie” was conducted to analyze language disorders in Cerebral Palsy. Seeing language and communication is crucial therefore this research is proposed to identify types of language disorders and their impacts on communication quality. The data of this were the utterances of a Cerebral Palsy character named Laila. This research used the language knowledge theory proposed by Carroll for examining language disorder types and the Communication Function Classification System by Hidecker et al for analyzing the effect of language disorders on communication quality. The data were analyzed by using the observation method and techniques of check, re-check, and cross-check where all data findings were observed, noted, and check properly then presented through words. From the analysis, Laila experienced; 66% phonological disorders where she stuttered and misarticulated words; 20% syntactic disorders where she forgot to use the auxiliary verb to be; 8% semantics disorders in which she uttered an idea that was not in accordance with the topic of discussion; and 6% pragmatics disorders whereas she gave irrelevantly and informatively answers. Her communication quality is level 4 where the phonological disorders greatly affect communication because people were difficult to understand her speech. Thus, the communication did not run effectively and efficiently. Keywords: Language Disorder, Cerebral Palsy, Communication

Specific Features of Operations of Semantic Syntaxing of Separate and Coherent Statements in oral and Written Speech in Younger Schoolchildren with Severe Speech Disorders

The article is devoted to the problem of formation of semantic level of syntaxing in the oral and written speech of younger schoolchildren with severe speech disorders. The purpose of the article is to present the results of the research of the semantic level of the syntactic component of the language ability of younger students with severe speech disorders. For a long time, the essence of the syntactic component of language ability was considered from the position of surface structure. In most cases, existing studies describe the external manifestations of syntactic disorders and do not reveal their mechanisms. At present, the issue of searching for the unformed mechanisms of the syntactic component of language ability has become relevant. According to T. V. Akhutina`s point of view, there are three multi-level syntax operations, that are carried out as an actualization of the frame, the slots of which are filled with the help of operations of selecting elements from the semantic-lexical paradigms of the appropriate level: meaningful, semantic and the level of formal-grammatical structuring (T. V. Akhutina, A. R. Luria, A. A. Leontiev and others). The lack of formation of one of the components prevents from successful making the syntactic component and the language ability in general. The topicality of identifying the features of the formation of the semantic level of syntax of primary school students is due, on the one hand, to the importance of its formation for the development of language ability, and on the other hand, to the insufficient development of the content and methods of speech therapy work in this direction. Errors that indicate the lack of formation of the semantic level of syntax of younger students with severe speech disorders consist in violation of the process of structuring a non-speech situation, the impossibility of calculating its components, which caused errors in the formation of the program of a separate and coherent statement in oral and written speech even at the pre-linguistic stage.

Expressive Language Used by Autistic Main Character in Please Stand By (2017) Movie

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty using language in communication. The language of autism sufferers in expressive language disorders includes phonological disorders, syntactic disorders, semantic disorders, and pragmatic disorders. The purpose of this study was to determine the types of expressive language disorders used by the main character in the movie Please Stand By (2017). The method of this research was descriptive qualitative because this research describes the phenomenon of expressive language disorder in the Please Stand By (2017) movie. The source of data used in this research is the script from the movie. Once collected, the data are categorized and analyzed based on their respective categories. In this research, the researcher found that Wendy exhibited several symptoms of a type of expressive language disorder, namely semantic disorders and pragmatic disorders. This disorder can be seen from the symptoms shown by the main character through her speech.

Syntactic Gender Agreement Processing on Direct-Object Clitics by Spanish-Speaking Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence from ERP.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a psycholinguistic profile evincing multiple syntactic processing impairments. Spanish-speaking children with DLD struggle with gender agreement on clitics; however, the existing evidence comes from offline, elicitation tasks. In the current study, we sought to determine whether converging evidence of this deficit can be found. In particular, we use the real-time processing technique of event-related brain potentials (ERP) with direct-object clitic pronouns in Spanish-speaking children with DLD. Our participants include 15 six-year-old Mexican Spanish-speaking children with DLD and 19 typically developing, age-matched (TD) children. Auditory sentences that matched or did not match the gender features of antecedents represented in pictures were employed as stimuli in a visual–auditory gender agreement task. Gender-agreement violations were associated with an enhanced anterior negativity between 250 and 500 ms post-target onset in the TD children group. In contrast, children with DLD showed no such effect. This absence of the left anterior negativity (LAN) effect suggests weaker lexical representation of morphosyntactic gender features and/or non-adult-like morphosyntactic gender feature checking for the DLD children. We discuss the relevance of these findings for theoretical accounts of DLD. Our findings may contribute to a better understanding of syntactic agreement processing and language disorders.

Speech-language intervention in schizophrenia: an integrative review

ABSTRACT Objective: to perform an integrative review to identify speech and language pathology intervention for schizophrenia. Methods: the review covered SCIELO, PUBMED, OXFORD JOURNALS and SCIENCEDIRECT databases for speech and language pathology intervention studies for schizophrenia. A narrative synthesis was adopted considering the level of clinical and methodological heterogeneity amid studies. Results: the results demonstrated an increase in publications since 2012 with 11 articles meeting the criteria. Language and discourse assessment were the speech and language pathology privileged procedures. Conclusion: the review indicates that the most eligible intervention was assessment, that studies’ methodology were heterogeneous and that the communication disorders identified were related to discursive, pragmatic and syntactic disorders, which evidences the importance of more systematized intervention procedures and research on schizophrenic patients.

Mechanisms underlying syntactic comprehension deficits in vascular aphasia: new evidence from self-paced listening

Sixty-one people with aphasia (pwa) and 41 matched controls were tested for the ability to understand sentences that required the ability to process particular syntactic elements and assign particular syntactic structures. Participants paced themselves word-by-word through 20 examples of 11 spoken sentence types and indicated which of two pictures corresponded to the meaning of each sentence. Sentences were developed in pairs such that comprehension of the experimental version of a pair required an aspect of syntactic processing not required in the corresponding baseline sentence. The need for the syntactic operations required only in the experimental version was triggered at a “critical word” in the experimental sentence. Listening times for critical words in experimental sentences were compared to those for corresponding words in the corresponding baseline sentences. The results were consistent with several models of syntactic comprehension deficits in pwa: resource reduction, slowed lexical and/or syntactic processing, abnormal susceptibility to interference from thematic roles generated non-syntactically. They suggest that a previously unidentified disturbance limiting the duration of parsing and interpretation may lead to these deficits, and that this mechanism may lead to structure-specific deficits in pwa. The results thus point to more than one mechanism underlying syntactic comprehension disorders both across and within pwa.

A case of “order insensitivity”? Natural and artificial language processing in a man with primary progressive aphasia

Processing of linear word order (linear configuration) is important for virtually all languages and essential to languages such as English which have little functional morphology. Damage to systems underpinning configurational processing may specifically affect word-order reliant sentence structures. We explore order processing in WR, a man with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). In a previous report, we showed how WR showed impaired processing of actives, which rely strongly on word order, but not passives where functional morphology signals thematic roles. Using the artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm, we examined WR's ability to process order in non-verbal, visual sequences and compared his profile to that of healthy controls, and aphasic participants with and without severe syntactic disorder. Results suggested that WR, like some other patients with severe syntactic impairment, was unable to detect linear configurational structure. The data are consistent with the notion that disruption of possibly domain-general linearization systems differentially affects processing of active and passive sentence structures. Further research is needed to test this account, and we suggest hypotheses for future studies.

Syntactic Disorders: Agrammatism in Japanese

統語機能は非常に複雑な機能であり, その障害は多様な現れ方をする。統語機能の神経学的基盤を解明するには単純な局在論を超えたアプローチが必要と考えられる。本稿では統語障害のうち表出面の問題である失文法を取り上げ, 近年の研究の動向を解説した。次に自験例を用いて日本語の表出面における統語障害を分析し, その特徴と発現メカニズムについて検討した。その結果, 統語障害には複数のパタンがあり, これには動詞, 動詞の項構造, 統語構造, 格助詞, 助動詞の処理が関係すると考えられた。病変部位との関係については統語構造の構成障害には左前頭葉下部の病変が関与し, 格助詞と動詞の障害には左側頭葉病変も関与する可能性が示された。統語機能は単一の脳部位のみに依存するのではなく, 複数の脳部位からなる神経ネットワークの協調作用に支えられていると考えられる。

Providing an orientation basis for a young blind reader’s structuring interaction with expository texts

The interventional case-study presented in this report was intended to explore how the use of aconceptual meta-model representing coherent and conceptual relations commonly appearing inexpository texts helped a blind reader to use structuring strategies in reading them. Theinstructional approach designed and tested in the study was based on the key elements of thetheory of planned stage-by-stage formation of mental acts and concepts (PSFMAC), introduced byGalperin, and also drew on contemporary approaches in reading comprehension interventions.The participant of the study was a 17-year-old, blind man with semantic and syntactic disorders inhis early language development. The results of the study indicate that the use of the developedconceptual meta-model appeared to considerably affect his strategies in structuring the expositorytext content. During the intervention, the participant started more accurately to take account ofsome frequent coherent and conceptual, particularly causal, relations that he was previouslyprone to ignore. He also started more actively to use external speech while reading. The resultsprovide evidence that the developed conceptual meta-model can serve as an external organizerhelping a blind reader to actively structure text content.

Communication in conversation in stroke patients

In stroke patients, it has been suggested that communication disorders could result from lexical and syntactic disorders in left hemisphere lesions and from pragmatics problems in right lesions. However, we have little information on patient behaviour in dyadic communication, especially in conversation. Here, we analyzed the various processes participating in communication difficulties at the rehabilitation phase (1-6 months) post-stroke, in order to define the main mechanisms of verbal and non-verbal communication (VC, NVC) disorders and their relationship with aphasic disorders. Sixty-three patients were recruited, who belonged to six groups, with left or right cortico-sub-cortical (L-CSC, R-CSC) or sub-cortical (L-SC, R-SC), frontal (Fro) or posterior fossa (PF) lesions. They were compared with an equivalent control group (gender, age, education level). We used the Lille Communication Test, which comprises three parts: participation to communication (greeting, attention, engagement), verbal communication (verbal comprehension, speech outflow, intelligibility, word production, syntax, verbal pragmatics and verbal feedback) and non-verbal communication (understanding gestures, affective expressivity, producing gestures, pragmatics and feedback). We also used the Functional Communication Profile and the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE). Decrease in participation was found in L-CSC, R-CSC and Fro patients. Verbal communication was essentially disrupted in L-SCS and L-SC groups, including by verbal pragmatic disorders, and to a lesser degree in frontal patients. Nonverbal communication was mainly affected in R-CSC patients, especially by pragmatic difficulties. L-CSC patients showed an increase in gesture production, compensating for aphasia. In conclusion, communication disorders were relatively complex and could not be summarised by syntactical and lexical difficulties in left stroke and pragmatic problems in right stroke. The former also showed severe verbal pragmatic difficulties. Frontal stroke also resulted in evident verbal and non-verbal disorders.

Interplay between phonology and syntax in French‐speaking children with specific language impairment

This study investigated the relationship between phonological and syntactic disorders of French-speaking children with specific language impairment in production. To compare three theories (pure phonological theory, surface theory, and mapping theory) of language developmental disorders, all of which view phonological difficulties as the main reason for the children's problems. The linguistic parameters (salience, phonological complexity, syntactic complexity, lexical/functional word, semantic/syntactic weight) that are fundamental to these theories were identified. The validity of these parameters was then tested against the phonological and syntactic results obtained by children with specific language impairment and control children. Nine syntactic categories were tested. Phonological complexity was the only parameter whose importance was confirmed, and this was only for phonological performance. Syntactic complexity did not correlate significantly with children's difficulties. Phonological salience did not correlate with phonological performance but was related to syntactic performance for French-speaking children. Mixed results were obtained for the other parameters, including negative correlations, which may call for different explanations. No theory fully explained the observed outcomes. Pure phonological theory was the most parsimonious, but could not explain all the results, in particular not the results with respect to grammar.

Specific order impairment in arabic number writing: A case‐study

The present study examines the transitory deficit in transcoding verbal to Arabic numbers in an aphasic patient, TM. She showed a mild syntactic impairment in syntactic comprehension of verbal numbers, with preserved performance in comprehension of Arabic numbers, in access to semantic representation, as well as in reading of Arabic numbers, but she committed 75% of errors when required to write numbers in the Arabic format to dictation. In conformity to the previous literature on transcoding deficits, the majority of her errors were syntactic (60%). However, most of them were unusual “order errors” (50%) in which lexical digits (e.g., 1 to 9) were written on the left and zeros on the right of the number, which contained in the majority of the cases the correct number of digits. A similar type of errors has been reported in only one previous case study (Delazer & Denes, 1998), but not specifically studied. We discuss hypotheses concerning its origins as stemming from a syntactic disorder within existing models of transcoding (McCloskey, Caramazza, & Basili, 1985; Power & Dal Martello, 1990). We also report kinematic assessment of the patient's handwriting before and after recovery. At time of the second examination, results show that her pattern of movement fluency parallels that of healthy subjects and supports a distinction between two types of zeros within Arabic numbers, in relation to the verbal code and the rules required to produce them. This paper thus also highlights the potential usefulness of using a digitising tablet in the study of transcoding deficits.

Zinsbegrip en Zinsproductie bij Broca- En Wernicke-Patienten

In this article I present the results of a comparison between six Dutch agrammatic aphasics and six Wernicke's aphasies on a sentence comprehension test and a sentence ordering test. One aim was to establish whether the Wernicke's aphasies suffer from a syntactic disorder, and whether this disorder resembles the syntactic disorder of agrammatics. A second aim was to see whether the problems observed in production are similar to the problems observed in comprehension and vice versa. The results show that Wernicke's aphasies suffer from a syntactic impairment, although the impairment differs from that in agrammatics. Specifically, agrammatics seem impaired in their ability to construct adequate syntactic representations, whereas Wernicke's aphasies seem to have an impairment in the syntactic information of the verbs. Finally, in agrammatism, it seems that only argument movement is problematic in both production and comprehension, while for the Wernicke's aphasies there is also a problem with verb movement in comprehension.

Working Memory Limitation, Phonological Deficit, Sequential Disorder and Syntactic Impairment in a Child with a Severe Developmental Dyslexia

The paper presents a case study of a child with a severe dyslexia, and focuses on the relationships between syntactic impairment, verbal memory limitation, sequential disorder and phonological deficit in his performance. These failures interacted very closely in his profile. An interesting and critical feature in the child's linguistic performance was the similarity between the pattern of syntactic errors displayed by him in sentence repetition and his syntactic performance in narrative productions elicited by a picture book. Comparisons between tasks requiring different levels of syntactic complexity and involving different memory demands suggested that he had a phonological/sequential/working memory impairment and a syntactic disorder. The complex interaction between phonological, syntactic and working memory deficits resulted in a severe learning disorder. The case study also suggests difficulties in the acquisition and the use of abstract linguistic elements. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Syntax, strategies, and the single case: a reply to Zurif

Abstract Zurif (1996) upholds a traditional view of clinical categories in aphasia research that seems calculated to retard theoretical progress. By contrast, we hold that individual patients who show previously undiscovered patterns of syntactic impairment should be placed on record irrespective of whether the subject's overall clinical presentation fits neatly into any nineteenth-century classification scheme. It is particularly important to document cases where the counterintuitive form of the syntactic disorder cannot be explained by prior models of aphasic comprehension, but can nonetheless be well described within the modular structure of current grammatical theory.

Broca′s Aphasia: A Syntactic and/or a Morphological Disorder? A Case Study

The patient described here suffers from Broca′s aphasia without a comprehension disorder. She is unique, since she has two speech styles available and she shifts between them spontaneously. One style is characterized by a mild syntactic disorder and the other by a quite severe morphological and syntactic disorder. None of the current theories about the underlying disorder in Broca patients without comprehension deficits can account for the fact that two linguistically different speech styles can occur in one patient, except the adaptation theory. It will be argued that both styles can be explained by the assumption of an impairment to the grammatical encoder (a processor which transforms the preverbal message into a surface structure, Levelt, 1989). This view suggests that the distinction between syntactic and morphological agrammatism could be a matter of strategy, rather than of impairment.

The Breakdown of Japanese Passives and Theta-Role Assignment Principle by Broca′s Aphasics

Syntactic comprehension of various types of passive sentences by Japanese Broca′s aphasic patients was investigated. Based on their performance on the so-called "possessive passive" and "indirect passive," we exemplified that the comprehension abilities of Broca′s aphasics and agrammatic Broca′s aphasics point to a distinction between the gapped and gapless passive, as is proposed in Kubo (1990). We proposed a new structural account of syntactic disorders in Japanese, based on the assumption that the Head parameter, the directionality parameter of theta-assignment, and the distinction between the internal argument and external argument are retained in the grammar of Broca′s aphasics. We then demonstrated that Broca′s aphasics interpret sentences by the argument structure of a predicate and by the canonical direction of the theta-assignment. It was also shown that the proposed principle can account for the Broca′s aphasics′ performance on other types of constructions and that it has many consequences for the language-universal account of syntactic deficits.

Syntactic findings in developmental verbal apraxia

Spontaneous language samples of eight children diagnosed as presenting developmental verbal apraxia were analyzed in terms of their mean length of utterance, Developmental Sentence Scores, use of 14 grammatical markers, and yes-no and wh-question forms. Although MLUs were greater than the range associated with stage V syntactic development, all children demonstrated difficulties with stage V and beyond grammatical markers and many omitted stage II markers. Developmental Sentence Scores were generally well below chronologic age expectations and revealed notable difficulties with personal pronoun and main verb selection. Omissions or noninversions of auxiliary and/or copulas in yes-no and wh-questions were apparent. Omissions of regular and irregular third-person singular markers, inconsistent use of regular and irregular past tense, and difficulty with question transformations provide evidence that at least some of the errors presented by this group of apraxic children cannot be attributed to motor speech and/or phonologic limitations but rather they evidence concomitant syntactic disorders.

Identifying patterns of syntactic disorder in six-year-old children.

This study analyzes profiles of syntactic usage among six-year old language disordered children. By means of the LARSP categories, the syntactic structures of 30 language disordered and 15 normal children were grouped by a Q-Factor analysis into clusters of mathematically similar profiles. Two groups with imbalanced syntactic development, in contrast to the normal pattern of balanced development were discerned. These appear to be similar to patterns found by Crystal. The first group (A) reveals normal clause development but inadequate phrase and word structures. The second group (B) exhibits a pattern of depressed word and phrase structure but even lower ability in the area of clause structure, with the added features of inconsistent performance and a wide gap between maximum and typical performance. The relationships between profiles found in this study and those found by Crystal, as well as implications of the research are discussed.

The word order problem in agrammatism: II. Production

This study demonstrates that agrammatic aphasics have difficulty describing relations that are signified by the order of noun phrases around verbs or prepositions. The word order deficit is found in a Sentence Order Task, in which written words must be arranged linearly to form a sentence, as well as in oral production. Ordering tendencies reflect factors like animacy or potency, rather than the systematic use of syntactic rules. These results point to a fundamental syntactic disorder in agrammatism.