Avrutin S, Lubarsky S, Greene J
Department of Linguistics, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
Brain Lang. 1999 Nov;70(2):163-86. doi: 10.1006/brln.1999.2154.
Comprehension of stress as a determiner of reference for pronouns was compared in eight patients with Broca's aphasia (BA) and five age-matched control subjects. The subjects were asked to listen to sentences in which the stressed or unstressed condition of the pronoun was a critical criterion for the establishment of reference. For each sentence, subjects were shown three pictures and asked to point to the correct referent of the pronoun. While the controls were nearly perfect in both the stressed and unstressed conditions, BA patients were significantly worse than normals, showing chance performance in both cases. However, a significant disparity was found in the BA patients' selection of the object NP as the referent under stressed and unstressed conditions, indicating that BA subjects are, indeed, sensitive to the stress patterns of pronouns. It was thus hypothesized that the BA patients' chance performance was the result of an inability to implement their knowledge of stress during the processing of sentences involving discourse-related linguistic operations, such as the establishment of pronoun reference (Grodzinsky, Wexler, Chien, Marakovitz, & Solomon, 1993). To test this hypothesis, a second experiment was conducted in which discourse-related operations were eliminated. In this second experiment, comprehension of stress by the same two groups was compared in tasks involving purely morphosyntactic processes. The contrastive stress patterns of otherwise homophonous compound nouns and adjectival phrases (e.g., BLACKboard, black BOARD), rather than those of pronouns, were examined. In this grammatically "simpler" experiment (i.e., without discourse-related operations), BA subjects scored significantly above chance in their comprehension of sentences involving compound nouns; unexpectedly, however, these same subjects did not show significantly above-chance performance in their comprehension of sentences containing adjectival phrases. Nevertheless, the results obtained in these two experiments seem to support the view that aphasic patients may have a lack of processing capacity, resulting in more errors during the processing of discourse-related linguistic constructions.
研究比较了8名布罗卡失语症（BA）患者和5名年龄匹配的对照受试者对作为代词指代决定因素的重音的理解。受试者被要求听一些句子，其中代词的重音或非重音状态是确定指代的关键标准。对于每个句子，向受试者展示三张图片，并要求他们指出代词的正确指代对象。虽然对照组在重音和非重音条件下的表现几乎完美，但BA患者明显比正常人差，在两种情况下都表现出随机水平。然而，在重音和非重音条件下，BA患者选择宾语名词短语作为指代对象时存在显著差异，这表明BA受试者确实对代词的重音模式敏感。因此，有人推测BA患者的随机表现是由于在处理涉及语篇相关语言操作（如代词指代的建立）的句子时，无法运用他们对重音的知识（格罗兹尼茨基、韦克斯勒、钱、马科维茨和所罗门，1993）。为了验证这一假设，进行了第二个实验，其中消除了语篇相关操作。在这个第二个实验中，比较了同一两组人在涉及纯形态句法过程的任务中对重音的理解。研究了同音复合名词和形容词短语（如“黑板”（BLACKboard）、“黑色的板子”（black BOARD））的对比重音模式，而不是代词的重音模式。在这个语法上“更简单”的实验（即没有语篇相关操作）中，BA受试者在理解包含复合名词的句子时得分显著高于随机水平；然而，出乎意料的是，这些受试者在理解包含形容词短语的句子时并没有表现出显著高于随机水平的表现。尽管如此，这两个实验获得的结果似乎支持了这样一种观点，即失语症患者可能缺乏处理能力，导致在处理语篇相关语言结构时出现更多错误。
