Sentence comprehension in aphasia in two clear case-marking languages

Area of Science:

• Neurolinguistics
• Psycholinguistics
• Computational linguistics

Background:

• Morphological case marking aids sentence comprehension in Indo-European languages.
• Grammatical gender in case marking can reduce clarity of grammatical roles.
• Hungarian and Turkish have reliable, gender-independent direct object marking.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how aphasia affects the use of case marking in sentence comprehension.
• To compare processing of case marking cues in Hungarian and Turkish aphasic patients.
• To examine the interaction between case marking, word order, and animacy in aphasia.

Main Methods:

• Aphasic and control subjects in Hungary and Turkey processed simple sentences.
• Sentences varied in case marking, word order, and noun animacy.
• Utilized the MacWhinney, Pléh, and Bates (1985) experimental design.

Main Results:

• Case marking strongly influenced sentence interpretation in all groups, but less so for aphasics.
• Wernicke's aphasics in Hungary showed the greatest difficulty with case cues.
• Animacy significantly affected interpretation, particularly in Turkish, and aphasics preserved native language patterns, albeit with more noise.

Conclusions:

• Aphasia impairs the use of reliable case marking cues for sentence comprehension.
• The detectability of case marking, not just its reliability, impacts processing in aphasia.
• Aphasic language processing retains native language biases but is less precise.