Notes: on Japanese language. In Japanese, one can reverse the word order (OSV= object-subject-verb or SOV) and unlike English, does not change the meaning to passive. A case particle is always placed after a nominal (subject or object) and in Japanese the case particle denotes the role of each word (subject or object). (Japanese is termed an "agglutinative" language).
Various theories exist about gradations of syntactic damage in aphasics and aphasia types. The Japanese language model for studying aphasics allows, for example, one to "control" for abnormal comprehension due to word order because word order does not affect comprehension. Fujita et al. (Jap J Jogoped Phoniatr 18:6-13, Japanese & Communic Disorders Res 6:151-161 in Japanese) proposed aphasics could be classified into 4 groups based on strategies of sentence comprehension, namely, 1) not decoding sentences at all 2) decoding by semantic constraint, 3) decoding by word order and 4) decoding by case particles.
The authors examined whether Japanese aphasics sensitivity to comprehension due to imbedded functors were due to the sentence types in which the functors were embedded, due to informational value and whether different aphasic types had different sensitivity to functors.
The task was in 64 sentence with various factors (inverted word order, not inverted, active, passive ) truth was assessed re pictorial accompanying. 42 aphasics and ten controls were run. Broca's patients had difficulty with truth decisions and could do so only with lexical meanings, ignoring syntactice structure. They had severe trouble with detecting incorrect functors. All aphasics had trouble with reversibility, that is they did worse with nonreversible than reversible sentences. Therefore all apahsics, Brocas plus Wernickes had trouble with functors.
No comments:
Post a Comment