Aydin Burcu, Barin Muzaffer, Yagiz Oktay
Department of English Language Education, Faculty of Education, Adnan Menderes University, 09010, Aydın, Turkey.
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Letters, Atatürk University, Erzurum, Turkey.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2017 Dec;46(6):1485-1507. doi: 10.1007/s10936-017-9508-9.
Brain damaged participants offer an opportunity to evaluate the cognitive and linguistic processes and make assumptions about how the brain works. Cognitive linguists have been investigating the underlying mechanisms of idiom comprehension to unravel the ongoing debate on hemispheric specialization in figurative language comprehension. The aim of this study is to evaluate and compare the comprehension of idiomatic expressions in left brain damaged (LBD) aphasic, right brain damaged (RBD) and healthy control participants. Idiom comprehension in eleven LBD aphasic participants, ten RBD participants and eleven healthy control participants were assessed with three tasks: String to Picture Matching Task, Literal Sentence Comprehension Task and Oral Idiom Definition Task. The results of the tasks showed that in overall idiom comprehension category, the left brain-damaged aphasic participants interpret idioms more literally compared to right brain-damaged participants. What is more, there is a significant difference in opaque idiom comprehension implying that left brain-damaged aphasic participants perform worse compared to right brain-damaged participants. On the other hand, there is no statistically significant difference in scores of transparent idiom comprehension between the left brain-damaged aphasic and right brain-damaged participants. This result also contribute to the idea that while figurative processing system is damaged in LBD aphasics, the literal comprehension mechanism is spared to some extent. The results of this study support the view that idiom comprehension sites are mainly left lateralized. Furthermore, the results of this study are in consistence with the Giora's Graded Salience Hypothesis.
脑损伤参与者提供了一个评估认知和语言过程的机会，并能对大脑的工作方式做出假设。认知语言学家一直在研究习语理解的潜在机制，以解开关于比喻性语言理解中半球特化的持续争论。本研究的目的是评估和比较左脑损伤（LBD）失语症患者、右脑损伤（RBD）患者和健康对照参与者对习语表达的理解。对11名LBD失语症患者、10名RBD患者和11名健康对照参与者进行了三项任务的习语理解评估：字符串与图片匹配任务、字面句子理解任务和口头习语定义任务。任务结果表明，在整体习语理解类别中，与右脑损伤参与者相比，左脑损伤失语症参与者对习语的理解更偏向字面意思。此外，在隐晦习语理解方面存在显著差异，这意味着与右脑损伤参与者相比，左脑损伤失语症参与者表现更差。另一方面，左脑损伤失语症患者和右脑损伤患者在透明习语理解得分上没有统计学上的显著差异。这一结果也支持了这样一种观点，即虽然LBD失语症患者的比喻处理系统受损，但字面理解机制在一定程度上得以保留。本研究结果支持习语理解部位主要位于左侧化的观点。此外，本研究结果与吉奥拉的分级显著性假设一致。
