Processing of disyllabic compound words in Chinese aphasia: evidence for the processing limitations account.
The current study addresses the debate between so-called 'structural' and 'processing limitation' accounts of aphasia, i.e., whether language impairments reflect the 'loss' of linguistic knowledge or its representations, or instead reflect a limitation in processing resources. Confrontation-naming task and category-judgment tasks were used to examine and compare the performance of non-fluent and fluent aphasics on different compound types of nouns and verbs. We demonstrate that aphasic patients' performance is modulated by the canonicity of the particular compound type, a result that holds true even for the category in which patients show a 'selective category deficit.' These findings weigh against the 'loss' of linguistic representations as the underlying cause of noun-verb deficits, instead supporting a 'processing limitations' approach.
Lee
Chia-Lin
CL
Laboratory for Cognitive Neuropsychology, National Yang Ming University, Taipei 112, Taiwan, ROC. charlene@daisy.ym.edu.tw
Hung
Daisy L
DL
Tse
John K-P
JK
Lee
Chia-Ying
CY
Tsai
Jie-Li
JL
Tzeng
Ovid J-L
OJ
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001041:Aphasia, Wernicke / Q000503:physiopathology*; D044466:Asian People; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011932:Reading