Pragmatic-mode mediation of sentence comprehension among aphasic bilinguals and hispanophones.
A test of sentence comprehension administered in four input-output modality combinations to a group of aphasic bilinguals and monolingual hispanophones provides evidence that aphasics tend to use pragmatic-mode (in the sense of Givón, 1979, On understanding-grammar, New York, Academic Press) strategies in approaching this task. When five factors were identified and dichotomized with respect to the pragmatic-mode-syntactic-mode dimension, the patients performed significantly better on items classified as pragmatic than on those classified as syntactic, in both languages. The results support a vertical/hierarchical view of aphasic language dissolution.
Schnitzer
M L
ML
Programa de Linguistica, University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000849:Anomia / Q000523:psychology; D001037:Aphasia / Q000523:psychology*; D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012660:Semantics; D014956:Writing