نشریه پژوهشهای زبانشناسی (Apr 2022)
Investigating the Effects of Animacy and Thematic Roles on Word Order in the Sentences of Persian Aphasia
Abstract
Abstract Brain damages and aphasia resulting from them are very common and their early detection is vital. Description of aphasic patients’ language and speech abilities can lead to the disorder diagnosis, its evaluation, and screening. By making use of a descriptive-analytic method, the present research intended to determine the language disorders caused by brain damages and show how the structural differences of languages affect aphasia symptoms among the patients at the speech therapy centers of Tehran. The control group included 10 safe and sound people, who were thoroughly the same as the case group composed of 7 patients in terms of age, education, and language. The tests included an oral and a written test. The studied people had to describe some pictures in the oral test and were supposed to unscramble some sentences in the written test. The findings indicated that the control group used agent-theme orders for describing the pictures without regarding animacy, while animacy was an effective factor on the order of noun phrases in the sentences and led to pre-posing of the themes in some cases. Additionally, it seemed that in patients with brain damages, animacy concept was an effective factor on the order of noun phrases in the sentences. Keywords: Brain Damage, Aphasia, Thematic Role, Animacy, Word Order Introduction Investigating languages of people with aphasic disorder by linguists leads scientists towards understanding how language is afflicted with disorder and at the same time the linguists can deal with theoretical issues based on the objective data. Some disorders are universal as they are found in almost all aphasic people, but some are language-specific. Some of these differences are related to the structures of a specific language and the amount of pressure the mind has to tolerate. The more complex the structure is, the more vulnerable they will be and the faster they will perish, hence being more enticing for linguists. The present research aimed at describing some structural disorders among the Persian speakers, who were afflicted with aphasia, so as to see how the structural features of Persian language could affect the outcome of these people. To this goal, word order, which is different in Persian and English, was chosen to see how the different structures of different languages affect aphasia. In addition, the relationship between the degree of complexity of a language and its vulnerability was found out besides surveying the effects of animacy and thematic role. It was hypothesized that there was a significant relationship between animacy and word order and between agent/ instrument, theme, and word order. Materials and Method This research was based on a descriptive-analytic methodology and the samples included those who had aphasic symptoms and were under treatment in the speech therapy centers of Tehran. of these people, 7 non-fluent people were chosen with the following criteria: having a severe disease but not completely impaired language output and the ability to express at least multi-word sentences. In terms of other side disorders, those, who did not have dyslexia or apraxia, were included so that they could read the sentence cards and use them to make their own sentences. In terms of the disease duration, those who had passed at least 3 weeks since their brain injury were taken into account because according to the experts, the presence of blood clots or inflammation of brain tissues at the beginning of the lesion could cause side effects and aggravation of symptoms in the patients. These tests were also performed on 10 control subjects. The patients and the control group were 22-77 and 25-72 years old, the average of whom were 52 and 51.1, respectively. In terms of education, both groups were relatively the same. Their language was Persian. All the patients were right-handed and were afflicted with non-fluent aphasia. The tests were given in two steps: the preparation step, in which the curer did his/her job with the linguists’ attendance so as to pave the way in a friendly relationship and the test execution step, in which the desired tests were performed in the next session after knowing more about the patients. According to Saffran and colleagues, the tests were composed of oral and written parts. Discussion of Results and Conclusion In all the tasks, the control group used the agent/instrument before the theme, while the obtained results were different for the patients. In the oral tasks, 71.4% of the patients used the agent/instrument before the theme. For the last picture, this ratio increased to 85.72%. In the written tasks, the results were different as well. For the first picture, the use of agent/patient order was 75%, while it was the only order used by the patients when describing the second picture. To describe the third and fourth pictures, this ratio decreased to 50%. The data were analyzed by using chi-square in Spss software. In both oral and written tasks, the results showed that there was no significant relationship between word order and animacy, but the significant relationship of thematic roles with word order was confirmed. In the written task, x2, degree of freedom, and p-value were respectively 4.5, 1, and 0.034, which meant that there was a significant relationship between the variables. In the oral tasks, x2, degree of freedom, and p-value were 14, 1, and 0.001, respectively. This also indicated the significant relationship between the variables. Kaplan believes that animacy is effective on word order in addition to the significant effects of thematic roles in the sentences produced by aphasic patients. He predicted the possible orders. In this research, his predictions were investigated in the data of Persian aphasia. The findings of the written and oral tasks were not the same. The ratio of word order in the oral tasks, except in the first picture, were not in accordance with Kaplan’s results, while there was more consistency between the obtained ratios and Kaplan’s predictions in the written tasks. This is predictable because reading and writing are two distinct skills and are not acquired alike in the human life. In fact, the degrees of disorder in these two skills depend on the patients’ capabilities before illness. The different word orders in Persian and English languages would be another reason. Even if the statistical tests did not show any significant relationships between animacy and order of noun groups, it would be seen that thematic roles were not the only determinant elements for word order in contrast to the case of the control group because animacy is the inherent feature of nouns, while identifying thematic roles depends on the understanding of complicated semantic relations between nouns and other elements of the sentence. Thus, when patients are unable to recognize these roles, using animacy will provide easier understanding. This finding is in accordance with Badecker and Caramazza’s second principle.
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