Thesis
Passive sentence constructions by Hindi-English bilingual speakers with Broca’s aphasia
- Creator
- Rights statement
- Awarding institution
- University of Strathclyde
- Date of award
- 2023
- Thesis identifier
- T16656
- Person Identifier (Local)
- 201893735
- Qualification Level
- Qualification Name
- Department, School or Faculty
- Abstract
- Background - It has been observed that speakers with Broca’s aphasia often have difficulties producing complex sentences with movement-derived structures. An example of this are passive sentences. Production of passive sentences in Broca’s aphasia is characterized by role reversals and syntactic errors in English. However, research on passive sentence constructions in languages which are syntactically different from English, such as Hindi, is scarce. Hence, more research is required to better understand language specific difficulties that patients with aphasia face while producing complex sentences and what can explain these deficits. Several language models try to explain the deficits in complex sentences in Broca’s aphasia. Representational models such as the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) (Grodzinsky, 2000) claim that some syntactic representations are lost in certain structures involving movement. Processing models claim that the computational mechanisms required to process syntactic representations are limited. For example, the Competition Model (MacWhinney et al., 1991) proposes that speakers resort to language specific cues while producing sentences. Based on this assumption, speakers should resort to word order cues in English while inflection and case markers should have the highest cue validity in Hindi. A better understanding of which model applies and which cues are most salient to speakers is important to guide effective treatment of monolingual and bilingual people with aphasia. Aim - The aim of the present study was to conduct a pilot investigation to determine what type of data would be required to investigate the performance of Hindi-English bilingual speakers in comprehension and production of passive sentences. Methods - Since a vast majority of population is bilingual in India, the current study focused on bilingual speakers. Five adult Hindi-English bilingual speakers with Broca’s aphasia participated in the study. Their language competence was assessed using the Cookie Theft picture description task from the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) (Goodglass et al., 2001). This was followed by the two main experimental tests which aimed to study passive sentence production and comprehension. Passive sentence comprehension was assessed using a sentence-to-picture matching task from subtest 55 for passives in the Psycholinguistic Assessments of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA) (Kay et al., 1992). Passive sentence production was tested using a picture description task adapted from the PALPA. Results - The results indicate that in the English passive sentence production task, the participants produced a higher number of syntactic errors than role reversals. The results for the passive production task in Hindi showed that the percentage of role reversals and syntactic errors was almost the same. The results do not support the Competition model since a higher number of role reversals were expected in English in comparison with Hindi. Other models cannot explain these types of differences in bilingual speakers with Broca’s aphasia’s language samples either. Conclusion - The asymmetry between English and Hindi results suggests that the current participants did not always resort to language specific cues while producing sentences. The finding that the number of role reversals was higher in Hindi in comparison to English suggests the presence of cross-language effects, i.e., the patients might have made use of cues such as word order in Hindi while producing passives which could have been transferred from English. However, more data needs to be collected in future studies in order to confirm the findings of the current study.
- Advisor / supervisor
- Lowit, Anja
- Kuschmann, Anja
- Resource Type
- DOI
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PDF of thesis T16656 | 2023-07-19 | 公开 | 下载 |