An investigation of syntactic impairment in relative clauses of a non-fluent aphasic patient
List of Authors
  • Deepa Visvanathan

Keyword
  • Relative Clauses, Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), Non-Fluent Aphasia, Syntactic Impairment, Sentence to Picture Matching Test

Abstract
  • This paper reports on a study on the typical characterization of syntactic impairment in relative clauses found in a patient diagnosed with non-fluent aphasia or also known as Broca ‘s aphasia at National Stroke Association of Malaysia (NASAM), Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. The study adopts the theory of Chomsky’s (1981) Government and Binding Theory that consist of (D)eep Structure and (S)urface Structure as a framework for the description of syntactic impairment and adopts an influential hypothesis by Grodzinsky’s (1990) Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) concerning agrammatism. The sentence structure used in this study is syntactically identical to the base order subject-verb-object (SVO) except for the movement of the object to the beginning of the sentence known as derived order that will result to the formation of object-subject-verb (OSV) in English, and thus enable examination of syntactic movement in agrammatic comprehension. This study involves one patient with non-fluent aphasia, native speaker of Tamil and speaker of English as second language from NASAM, performing a sentence - to-picture matching test. This study reveals the patient’s comprehension of subject relative clauses (SVO structure) are significantly above chance level, but object relative clauses (OSV structure) are at chance level. This study reveals that the score obtained by the patient is within the percentage and performance level (standard norm) proposed by Grodzinsky. These results also show that the non-fluent aphasic patient’s ability to comprehend the relative clauses that involve movement of a noun phrase is impaired.

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