Abstract
This book is an investigation of the natural speech output1 of four speakers of Mandarin Chinese who suffered aphasia following brain damage. The method of investigation is a careful analysis of transcribed audiotapes recorded in interview situations. The resulting speech corpora (presented in full in the Appendix) are analyzed for their phonological, morphological, syntactic, discourse and pragmatic linguistic content.
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Notes
This work does not discuss Chinese character orthography production or perception deficts in aphasic patients. For a good summary of these studies, see Hoosain (1991) or Paradis et al. (1985).
Most previous work on aphasia in Chinese speakers has not included detailed discussion of patients’ speech production problems (for a review, see Hoosain 1991). Exceptions to this are experimental studies by Tzeng et al. (1991), and Bates et al. (1991), whose results will be discussed as they become relevant to our investigation.
Edgar Zurif has pointed out that these non-language-specific factors may reflect general cognitive capacities shared by the language faculty.
For example, Mandarin has a grammatical category often called ‘coverb’, which may be considered a function word depending on how it is used in a given context (see section 2.3.1).
In section 2.3.11 we discuss the possible existence of inflection in an abstract sense in Chinese, manifested in an abstract INFL node in Chinese syntactic theory.
A notable exception to this is Miceli et al. (1983), who observe that “Derivational morphology appears to be spared…” in their two mildly agrammatic Italian-speaking patients.
Possible exceptions to this are discussed in section 2.3.11.
Fodor posits the perceptual systems plus language (p. 44) as candidates for modular systems.
Fodor’s focus is on the unavailability of module-internal information to central consciousness (1983, p. 55). However, this information is also posited to be relatively inaccessible to other modules (see discussion in Levelt 1989, pp. 276-282). As an example, consider the Lexical Integrity Hypothesis (LIH, Jackendoff 1972). According to the LIH, the syntax may not refer to the internal structure of a word (‘once a word, always a word’). Intermediate stages of word representation or processing are therefore inaccessible to syntactic operations, meaning that the syntactic component has no access to the intermediate representations within the word formation component.
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Packard, J.L. (1993). Introduction. In: A Linguistic Investigation of Aphasic Chinese Speech. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2040-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2040-1_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-010-4903-0
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