Assessing syntactic deficits in Chinese Broca’s aphasia using the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences-Chinese (NAVS-C)

Abstract

Background: English-speaking patients with Broca’s aphasia and agrammatism evince difficulty with complex grammatical structures, including verbs and sentences. A few studies have found similar patterns among Chinese-speaking patients with Broca’s aphasia, despite structural differences between these two languages. However, no studies have explicitly examined verb properties, including the number and optionality of arguments (participant roles) selected by the verb, and only a few studies have examined sentence deficits among Chinese patients. In addition, there are no test batteries presently available to assess syntactically important properties of verbs and sentences in Chinese patients.

Aims: This study used a Chinese version of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS), originally developed for English speakers with aphasia, to examine the verb and sentence deficit patterns among Chinese speakers with aphasia. As in the original NAVS, the Chinese version (NAVS-C) assessed verbs by the number and optionality of arguments as well as sentence canonicity, in the both production and comprehension.

Methods and Procedures: Fifteen Chinese patients with Broca’s aphasia and 15 age-matched healthy normal controls participated in this study. All NAVS-C tests were administered, in which participants were asked either to produce or to identify verbs and sentences coinciding with action pictures.

Outcomes & Results: Despite grammatical differences between Chinese and English, the impairment caused by the structural complexity of verbs and sentences was replicated in Chinese-speaking patients using the NAVS-C. Verbs with more arguments were significantly more impaired than those with fewer arguments and verbs with optional arguments were significantly more impaired than those with obligatory arguments. One deviation from English-speaking patients, however, is that the Chinese-speaking patients exhibited greater difficulty with subject relative clauses than with object relative clauses because the former, rather than the latter, involve noncanonical order in Chinese. Similar to English-speaking patients, Chinese patients exhibited more difficulty with object-extracted wh-questions than with subject-extracted wh-questions, suggesting that wh-movement in Logical Form may also cause processing difficulty. Moreover, Chinese-speaking patients exhibited similar performance in both production and comprehension, indicating the deficits in both modalities.

Conclusions: The number and optionality of verb arguments as well as the canonicity of the Agent–Theme order in sentences impact Chinese-speaking individuals with aphasia as they do in the case of English-speaking patients. These findings indicate that the NAVS-C is a useful tool for detailing deficit patterns associated with syntactic processing in patients with aphasia cross-linguistically.

Keywords:

• Syntactic complexity
• verb argument structure
• NAVS
• Chinese aphasia
• aphasia assessment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Abbreviations used in this paper are as follows: Cl = classifier; DE = the linker between the relative clause and the modified noun; Pass = passive marker; Perf = perfective marker; Prog = progressive marker.

2. In the generative syntax literature, the derivation of syntactic structures goes through several levels of representation, one of which is Logical Form, which specifies the interpretive structure of sentences (Chomsky, 1981; May, 1985).

3. In most of the literature on Chinese aphasia, agrammatism and Broca’s aphasia are used interchangeably (e.g., Law & Leung, 1998, 2000; Su et al., 2007) and no systematic assessments have been developed to delineate agrammatic language deficits in Chinese patients.

4. Although the age-of-acquisition is known to affect word processing among aphasic speakers (Hirsh & Ellis, 1994; Morrison et al., 1992), this variable was not controlled in the present study because these data are not available in the Chinese language. Studies are limited to those detailing acquisition of verb usage by sentence type, for example, in the case of the three-argument verb gei “give,” children first acquire the one-argument usage, then the two-argument usage, and ultimately the three-argument usage by the age of two (Li, 2004; Zhou, 2011; Zou, 2012). We appreciate an anonymous reviewer’s comment on age-of-acquisition, which points out a need for such norms in Chinese.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the following grants: the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of Ministry of China for Young Scholars [grant number 15YJC740079]; the Beijing Social Science Foundation [grant number 14WYC045]; the Central University Fundamental Research Foundation of Beihang University [grant number 296505], [grant number 401262], and [grant number YWF-15-WYXY-014].