The production of grammatical and lexical determiners in Broca’s aphasia

ABSTRACT

Determiner production is a testing ground for theories of Broca’s aphasia and agrammatic speech. On one type of theory, determiner production is impaired in so far as determiners are grammatical items. On another type of theory, determiner production is impaired because determiners depend on verbs for case-assignment. These two types of theories are mutually compatible, but in recent years, research on determiner production has focused on the second type. In order to test the first type, an experiment was carried out which contrasted the production of Danish grammatical determiners (indefinite articles) and lexical ones (numerals) in five speakers diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia and four non-brain-damaged controls. The results strongly support the first type of theories: (1) in agrammatic speech, only grammatical determiners were omitted to an extent which differs from omission rates in the speech of the controls; (2) substitutions of grammatical agreement markers were found only in agrammatic speech.

KEYWORDS:

• Agrammatism
• language production
• determiners
• articles
• numerals

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, SRN. The data are not publicly available due to the fact that they contain information that could compromise the privacy of research participants.

Notes

1. A central argument for this view of case comes from languages in which nouns have lost case, but pronouns retain it. The argument goes like this: since, for instance, the verb kiss assigns case to the pronouns in She kissed him, it must assign case also to the NPs in The girl kissed the boy.

2. For en, 94% of the relevant occurrences are articles, while 6% are numerals. For et, 93% of the relevant occurrences are articles, while 7% are numerals.

3. The fastest half of the participants are the participants who had the shortest reaction times. The authors argue that the effect of grammatical vs. lexical status found in the fastest participants was counterbalanced by a frequency effect in the slowest group: grammatical determiners are harder to produce than lexical determiners, but infrequent items are harder to produce than frequent ones, and the lexical determiners studied were much less frequent than the grammatical determiners studied.

4. In a large corpus of Danish, KorpusDK (accessed 2014), approximately 991,000 determiner occurrences of en were found (6% numerals, 94% articles), and approximately 463,000 determiner occurrences of et (7% numerals, 93% articles).

Additional information

Funding

The authors Violaine Michel Lange and Kasper Boye were partially supported by the University of Copenhagen Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research (Project title: PROGRAM: Information PROminence and GRAMmar in mind and brain). The author Roelien Bastiaanse is partially supported by the Сenter for Language and Brain NRU Higher School of Economics, RF Government grant, ag. № 14.641.31.0004.