The discrimination of intonational contours in Broca’s aphasia

Abstract

The observation has been made that agrammatic speakers fail in the comprehension of various sentence types, and this behaviour has been attributed to diminished syntactic capabilities, under the unverified assumption that perception of intonation is intact. Here we re-examine this assumption experimentally with a language, Catalan, which allows for intonation to be the only variable over four sentence types (declaratives, yes-no questions, topicalisations and contrastive focus constructions). We conducted a discrimination task with 10 agrammatic and 10 age- and education-matched control subjects. The subjects were asked to decide whether sentence pairs were identical or not. The overall agrammatic performance was very accurate (89.1% versus 95.6% correct of the controls). The aphasic participants performed above chance in six out of seven conditions. The results indicate that agrammatic individuals succeeded in the task and that their perception of intonation is spared. We conclude that failure in comprehension in agrammatism cannot be attributed to prosodic disruption.

• Broca’s aphasia
• Catalan
• contrastive focus
• declaratives
• intonation
• perception
• topicalisations
• yes-no questions

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the subjects who took part in the experiment reported, and the Associació Sant Pau de Trastorns del Llenguatge in Barcelona. We are grateful to Eduard Artés for recording the materials, and to Anna Espinal (Servei d’Estadística Aplicada, UAB) for her help with the statistics. Thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers, for their comments and suggestions, and to the audiences at the 2nd Nordic Conference of Clinical Linguistics in Oslo, the XII Science of Aphasia meeting in Barcelona, and the 2012 Prosody in Typical and Atypical Populations meeting in Reading. Finally, we are indebted to projects FFI2011-29440-C03-03 and 2009SGR-1079 for funding.

Notes

*We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out this possibility.