Negation Production in People with Aphasia: Selective Impairment in a Repetition Task

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

Conferencia; Academy of Aphasia 58th Annual Meeting; 2020

Academy of Aphasia

BackgroundFor some people with aphasia (PWA), impaired language production and comprehension can include difficulty with negation (e.g., sentences such as ?It is not raining?). Understanding and producing negation is at the core of language ability, as negation is foundational to what humans need to do with language (e.g., expressing dislikes, directing others to avoid certain actions, etc.). The observation that PWA, especially those with non-fluent aphasia, have difficulty with negation has been reported for speakers of different languages (e.g. Fyndanis et al., 2006; Rispens et al., 2001) but the scope of the problem is not well-understood. AimThe aim of our research project is to examine accuracy performance of PWA in producing and comprehending words, phrases, and sentences with negation expressions. We seek to draw upon cross-linguistic variations (in Arabic, English, Hebrew and Spanish) in the use of negation, to examine to what degree negation processing is impaired in aphasia. As a first step toward this aim, we designed a repetition task with different sentence structures in thefour languages. In this presentation we report preliminary data collected with this task in Spanish and English.MethodsParticipants: We collected data from four PWA: two Spanish monolingual speakers, and two multilingual speakers, tested in English. Tasks: The repetition task included the following conditions, each including stimuli with and without negation: - SVO sentences in the present continuous (e.g., The father was / not drinking coffee) and in the present simple (The father drinks / does not drinkcoffee) tenses -Sentences with negative concord (e.g., The aunt is not eating anything)-Predicate sentences (e.g., The shoe was / not red)- SV sentences (e.g., The woman is / not dancing)Procedure and scoring: We recorded each participant?s responses and transcribed them verbatim. We then coded each response as accurate or not. In addition, for inaccurate responses we coded the error type (e.g., omission of the negation expression). ResultsWe found that all participants demonstrated some degree of difficulty with the task but two participants (Spanish 1 and English 1) showed difficulty specifically with negation. Performance was not uniform across the five conditions. When focusing on errors concerning negation, we found that both participants exhibited omission and additionof negationexpressions, but English 1 also showed word order errors and, in sentences where the use of negation expression required an auxiliary (e.g., does not), omissions of the auxiliary verb (see Table 1).DiscussionOur preliminary results demonstrate that PWA can have great difficulty repeating simple sentences that contain negation. Furthermore, the selective difficulty observed across conditions and languages appears to be affected by aphasia profile, sentence length, and characteristics of the language structure. Our ongoing data collection from additional participants and with additional tasks will help understand cross-linguistically the interaction among semantic and grammatical aspects of negation.