Negation in a repetition task: a study in aphasia.

MARÍA ELINA SÁNCHEZ; JAICHENCO, VIRGINIA; ALXATIB, SAM; LIBBEN, GARY; GORAL, MIRA

Madrid

Simposio; XV International Symposium of Psycholinguistics; 2021

Impaired language can include difficulty with negation in people with aphasia (PWA). This difficulty has been reported for speakers of different languages (Fyndanis et al., 2006; Rispens et al., 2001) but the scope of the problem is not well-understood. The aim of study is to examine performance of PWA in producing and comprehending words and sentences with negation expressions. We seek to draw upon cross-linguistic variations (in Arabic, English, Hebrew and Spanish) in the use of negation. As a first step, we report data of a repetition task in Spanish and English. Participants: 4 PWA participated: 2 Spanish speakers (S), 2 English speakers (E).Materials: The repetition task included sentences in 5 conditions:-SVO/ present continuous (The father was / not drinking coffee).-SVO/ present simple (The father drinks / does not drink coffee).-Negative concord (The father is not eating anything).-Predicate (The shoe was / not red).- SV (The father is / not dancing).Performance of the participants was not uniform across the five conditions. Two participants (S1 and E1) showed difficulty with negation. When focusing on errors, we found that both participants exhibited omission and addition of negation expressions, but E1 also showed word order errors and omissions of the auxiliary verb (does not). The selective difficulty observed across conditions and languages appears to be affected by characteristics of the language structure. Our ongoing data collection from additional participants, languages, and tasks will help understand the interaction among semantic and grammatical aspects of negation cross-linguistically.