Wulfeck B, Bates E, Capasso R
Department of Pediatrics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla 92093.
Brain Lang. 1991 Aug;41(2):311-36. doi: 10.1016/0093-934x(91)90158-w.
Crosslinguistic studies of sentence comprehension and production in Broca's aphasia have yielded two complementary findings: (1) grammatical morphology appears to be more impaired than word order principles in every language studied, but (2) the degree to which grammatical morphology is retained by aphasic patients depends upon the "strength" or importance of those morphemes in the patient's premorbid language. In an earlier study comparing violations of word order and agreement, we found that English-speaking Broca's aphasics showed greater sensitivity to errors of ordering than to errors of agreement, providing further evidence for the selective vulnerability of morphology. However, because English is a rigid word order language with a relatively weak inflectional system, it could be argued that word order is resilient to brain damage because it is the strongest source of information in this language. The present study compared the performance of English-speaking Broca's aphasics and normal controls with their Italian counterparts in the same grammaticality judgment experiment. Four predictions relating to our previous work were confirmed. (1) Italian aphasics, like their English-speaking counterparts, showed general preservation of grammatical knowledge and (2) they were able to use this knowledge in an "on-line" fashion. (3) Within each language, Broca's aphasics showed greater impairment in their ability to recognize errors of morphological selection (i.e., agreement) compared with errors made by moving the same words to an incorrect position downstream. Nevertheless (4), crosslinguistic differences observed in previous studies of comprehension and production were also observed in this grammaticality judgment task: a processing advantage for agreement errors in Italian normals and aphasics, and a processing advantage for ordering errors in English normals and aphasics.
（1）在所有被研究的语言中，语法形态似乎比词序原则受损更严重，但（2）失语症患者保留语法形态的程度取决于这些语素在患者病前语言中的“强度”或重要性。在一项早期比较词序违反和一致性违反的研究中，我们发现说英语的布罗卡失语症患者对词序错误比对一致性错误表现出更高的敏感性，这为形态学的选择性易损性提供了进一步的证据。然而，由于英语是一种词序严格且屈折系统相对较弱的语言，有人可能会认为词序对脑损伤具有弹性，因为它是这种语言中最强的信息来源。本研究在同一个语法性判断实验中比较了说英语的布罗卡失语症患者和正常对照组与说意大利语的对应人群的表现。与我们之前的研究相关的四个预测得到了证实。（1）意大利失语症患者和说英语的患者一样，表现出语法知识的总体保留，并且（(2）他们能够以“在线”方式运用这些知识。（3）在每种语言中，与将相同单词移到下游错误位置所产生的错误相比，布罗卡失语症患者在识别形态选择错误（即一致性错误）的能力上受损更严重。尽管如此（4），在这项语法性判断任务中也观察到了先前在理解和产出研究中发现的跨语言差异：意大利语正常人和失语症患者在一致性错误上有加工优势，而英语正常人和失语症患者在词序错误上有加工优势。
