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Question production in agrammatism: the tree pruning hypothesis.

Naama Friedmann¹

¹Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. naamafr@post.tau.ac.il

Brain and Language

|February 6, 2002

Summary

Agrammatic aphasia affects question production differently across languages. Hebrew and Arabic speakers struggle with Wh-questions but not yes/no questions, unlike English speakers who have difficulty with both.

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Area of Science:

Neurolinguistics
Psycholinguistics
Clinical Linguistics

Background:

Agrammatic aphasia is a language disorder characterized by difficulties in producing grammatically correct sentences.
Question production, particularly Wh-questions, is often impaired in individuals with agrammatic aphasia.
Language-specific properties may influence the manifestation of question production deficits.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate question production in agrammatic aphasia, comparing Wh-questions and yes/no questions.
To examine the interaction between the question production deficit and language-specific linguistic properties.
To test the predictions of the Tree Pruning Hypothesis regarding syntactic impairments in agrammatism.

Main Methods:

The study involved 16 participants with agrammatic aphasia (13 Hebrew, 2 Palestinian Arabic, 1 English).
Data collection included sentence elicitation and repetition tasks.
Analysis of spontaneous speech (2272 utterances) was also conducted.

Main Results:

Hebrew and Arabic-speaking agrammatics showed severe difficulties with Wh-question production but preserved yes/no question production.
English-speaking agrammatics demonstrated impairment in producing both Wh-questions and yes/no questions.
Error patterns were consistent with the Tree Pruning Hypothesis.

Conclusions:

The ability to produce Wh-questions and yes/no questions in agrammatic aphasia is influenced by language-specific syntactic structures.
The findings support the Tree Pruning Hypothesis, suggesting impairment of higher syntactic nodes in agrammatism.
Dissociations in question production highlight the complex interplay between aphasia and linguistic typology.

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