Production of the adjective and possessive markers de in Chinese post-stroke aphasia

Research has shown that patients with post-stroke aphasia may encounter difficulties in producing inflectional morphemes. Interestingly, they also show distinct challenges with the inflectional morphemes of homophones, such as the plural marker s and the possessive marker 's in English. However, previous studies have predominantly focused on morphemes in European languages. Inflectional morphemes that are homophones are common in Chinese. It is necessary to investigate whether Chinese speakers with post-stroke aphasia also show variable patterns of more or less impaired performance with the inflectional morphemes of homophones in Chinese. This study aimed to examine whether Chinese speakers with stroke aphasia exhibit differential performance in producing the adjective marker de and the possessive marker de, although they have identical pronunciation and written form. An elicitation task was administered on 20 patients with post-stroke aphasia and 20 healthy Chinese speakers. The results showed that Chinese speakers with stroke aphasia produced the adjective marker de at a significantly higher accuracy rate than the possessive marker de, while nearly all the healthy Chinese speakers produced both the adjective marker de and the possessive marker de correctly. This indicates that Chinese speakers with stroke aphasia exhibited superior production of the adjective marker de compared to the possessive marker de. This discrepancy in performance may be attributed to the more complex syntactic structure associated with the possessive marker de.