Cross Language Analysis of German- and Hungarian-Speaking Broca’s Aphasics’ Processing of Selected Morphonological and Morphological Features : A Pilot Study
Year: 1996
Type: book
Abstract: Linguistic analysis of an aphasic's language processing abilities and deficits provides information on the structure of the functional subcomponents, separate 'units' or 'modules' according to which language is processed by speakers of a particular language.Until recently studies of language breakdown have been based primarily on data or corpora from a single 'homogeneous' language.Depending on the degree of sophistication of the applied language tasks -global quantitative measures and/or detailed qualitative analysis -the results obtained from such investigations provide crucial information on the functional subcomponents of a specific language.This is a first step in addressing the issue of 'which of the distinctions within language appear to be relevant to the brain'.Under this 'monolanguage' approach it is not possible to provide ultimate answers to such a universal issue, namely how language is processed by the brain.Using data from a single language is too restrictive for determining psycholinguistic or cognitive strategies involved in language processing, in that not all possible structural distinctions are present in a single language.Valid language-specific aspects of language processing can be obtained from such studies, however, in order to arrive at an answer to the question how language is organized in the brain, it is necessary to compare language breakdown across languages with regard to subjects' performance on tasks which can be considered to tap parallel relevant features and the interactions among the features in the languages under investigation.Cross-linguistic comparison of aphasics' language processing abilities allows a differentiation of language-specific aspects of processing, i.e. aspects which are determined by the structure of the particular single language, from more universal, i.e. shared properties of language processing which correlate with specific structures in the various languages (cf.Bates et al. 1991).The aim of this pilot study is to examine the performance of agrammatic German-and Hungarian-speaking Broca's aphasics with regard to various aspects of morphological, morphonological and morphosyntactic processing.In particular we are interested in the relationship between inflectional and word formation morphological processes in Germanand Hungarian-speaking aphasics.These components or subcomponents or 'modules' are more similar to each other in (predominantly agglutinating) Hungarian than in (predominantly inflecting) German.Within morphonology (cf.Dressier 1985a), vowel harmony processes are characteristic of Hungarian, umlaut (metaphony) processes of German.The ultimate goal was to arrive at adequate means -parallel tasks, structures, etc. -for comparing the
Authors: Dressler, Wolfgang, Stark, Jacqueline, Pons, Christiane, Kiefer, Ferenc, Kiss, Katalin, Mészáros, Éva
Institutions: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6990144960