Pragmatics in Aphasia: Crosslinguistic Evidence

Abstract

Previous research suggests that English Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics retain sensitivity to pragmatic factors governing forms of reference, in particular the ability to choose lexical expressions that convey givenness and newness of information. The present study investigates the generality of this phenomenon across patients and language types. Normal and aphasic speakers of English, German, and Italian described nine picture triplets in which one element varied while the others remained constant. Dependent variables included lexicalization versus ellipsis, pronominalization, and definite and indefinite article use. For a subset of German and Italian patients, data were compared to performance in a biographical interview. Results indicate that (a) the pragmatics of reference are preserved in both Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics, despite syndrome-specific problems in retrieving content words and/or closed-class grammatical elements, and (b) certain language-specific patterns of reference are also preserved, including crosslinguistic differences in subject omission. Differences between picture description and the biographical interview reinforce this conclusion. Evidence for the preservation of pragmatics in aphasis is not surprising in its own right, but evidence for the sparing of language-specific relations among pragmatic, lexical, and morphosyntactic patterns can be used to argue against any strong view of grammatical impairment as a disconnection syndrome and/or a loss of grammatical competence. Instead, these data support theories in which grammatical impairment is viewed as a performance deficit.

Cross-linguistic research in aphasia: An overview

“…Again, we could attribute this to an accidental difference in severity level in our two language groups. And yet a very different profile is observed in omission of the sentence subject: Subject omission is clearly much more common in Italian patients than it is in German or in English (Wulfeck et al, 1989). This difference is best explained by the fact that subject omission is a legal option in Italian (e.g., it is possible to say "Is going to the store" or "Is raining"); the same option is not permitted in German or in English.…”

“…OVERVIEW OF CROSSLINGUISTIC EVIDENCE Our own crosslinguistic aphasia project is built upon the theoretical, empirical, methodological and organizational foundations provided by 18 years of crosslinguistic research on normal adults and children by Bates and MacWhinney (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987;MacWhinney & Bates, 1989). The theory of language processing that has emerged from that work, i.e.…”

“…Building on an earlier study with English patients (Bates, Hamby & Zurif, 1983), we have examined the effect of the given-new contrast on several aspects of linguistic expression in English, Italian and German patients (Wulfeck et al, 1989). Briefly stated, results suggest that Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics both retain sensitivity to the givennew contrast: in the decision about which elements in the picture to lexicalize (new) or omit (old), in the use of indefinite (new) vs. definite (old) articles, in the use of pronouns (which tend to be used to express old information, when they are used at all).…”

The crosslinguistic assessment of foreign language vocabulary learning

“…Even within the area of lexical processing, it is clear that much more work can be done. We will need to supplement a visual lexical decision task of this type with other tasks such as auditory lexical decision or naming (Simpson & Krueger, 1991), picture-name priming (Schriefers, Meyer & Levelt, 1990), and lexical processing during sentence interpretation (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989;MacWhinney, Bates & Kliegl, 1984;McDonald & MacWhinney, 1995). A fuller understanding of crosslinguistic patterns in language learning will not emerge until we have secured a much greater control over the basic methodology of crosslinguistic assessment.…”

“…They are often unsure of their knowledge and try to make use of all the information at their disposal. Their long reaction times are much like those found in young children (Walley, 1988) or aphasics (Friederici, Weissenborn & Kail, 1991;Wulfeck et al, 1989). Because analyses of modularity (Fodor, 1983) and context effects (Swinney, 1979) during lexical access depend crucially on the exclusion of strategic processing (Balota & Chumbley, 1985), it makes sense to confine such studies to the examination of normal, highly fluent adults, rather than children or second language learners.…”