Syntactic comprehension in aphasia. An evaluation test with relative clauses in Spanish

SÁNCHEZ, MARÍA ELINA

Nueva York

Exposici�n; Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences. Lehman College, CUNY; 2017

Lehman College, CUNY

This work aimed to try out an instrument that can detect the sentences comprehension deficits by manipulating two types of structures with relative clauses (subject and object) in Spanish. We compare the performance between aphasic patients and their controls using a binary sentence?picture matching task. The type of structure was manipulated: El oso que patea al perro es azul [The bear that kicks the dog is blue] (subject relative clause) vs. El oso al que patea el perro es azul [The bear that the dog kicks is blue] (object relative clause). The test was administered to 151 native Spanish speakers, of 3 age groups and 3 different schooling levels, and a group of 5 aphasic patients. The results showed that in the control group there is a strong interaction between the type of sentence and the level of schooling, with more errors in the sentences with a relative object as the level of schooling decreases. Aphasic patients, as a group, did not differ from the lowest schooling groups in subject relative clauses, but did diverge from all groups in object relative clauses. Within the group of patients, we found that three patients (AG, RD and RR) did not differ from their control group in subject relative clauses, but in object relative clauses. Contrary, a patient (OV) differs significantly from their control group in the two structures, that is, it is worse in both object and subject relative clauses (although in the case of object clause, their performance is much worse). Finally, RC patient does not differ significantly in any of the two structures with their control group. The data allow establishing differences between patients with and without syntactic alterations. First, the data allow us to discuss how schooling affects the processing of these two structures in Spanish in subjects without language impairment. In addition, the evidence shows that agrammatic aphasic patients clearly have difficulties to assign the thematic roles to non-canonical structures, and this test is sensitive to detect them.