Abstract
This chapter presents a detailed grammatical analysis of the speech deficits of four aphasic speakers of Mandarin Chinese, Li Xinzheng1 (LXZ), Guo Jiande (GJD), Yang Xifeng (YXF) and Zheng Youjuan (ZYJ). LXZ, GJD and YXF were hospitalized in Taipei, Taiwan, and ZYJ was hospitalized in Beijing, China. They were referred by staff doctors and speech pathologists, and their speech was recorded in 1982-83. The original taping occurred as part of a subject selection protocol for a phonological study of tone production in aphasic Chinese speech (Packard 1984, 1986). These four patients were selected for this grammatical study because the speech sample from their interview (see following paragraph) was long enough and contained enough identifiable lexical and syntactic constituents to support a proper grammatical analysis. LXZ and YXF represent prototypical examples of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia respectively, while GJD and ZYJ fit traditional diagnostic categories less closely.
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Notes
The patients’ real names are not used here.
My thanks to Sylvia Chen, who did most of the interviewing in Taipei, and Hu Chaoqun who did most of the interviewing in Beijing.
My thanks to Pao-yuan Chen, Xiaoyu Chen, Shengli Feng. Thanks also to Sylvia Chen for help in clarifying some passages.
Due to space limitations, the examples given in this chapter are sometimes edited versions of those which appear in full in the Appendix.
Which may itself be a spurious instance of jargon.
Mandarin, the official language of Taiwan, is the language of instruction and is used for most public and officiai communications. Taiwanese is the native language of the majority (71%, Kubier 1985) of the inhabitants of Taiwan, but most residents of the larger cities have significant exposure to Mandarin before beginning formal education.
For a detailed description of Taiwan Mandarin, see Kubier (1984).
The retroflex r is more commonly retained in Taiwan Mandarin, perhaps because of the absence of its counterpart (viz., the phonetic [z]) in the apical series in standard Mandarin.
The use of s in place of sh is normal in Taiwan Mandarin for this word, but the use of the apical nasal n in place of the velar nasal ng and the vowel α in place of e is not.
Note that this type of error is usually seen in Wemicke’s rather than Broca’s aphasia. Deletion of an obligatory direct object.
An omission is posited here, and not in the following sentence with zhiliao because while zhiliao is a verb, the substituted word dianliao is a noun, and would require a preceding verb to make the sentence grammatical.
The probability of the four percentages randomly occurring in the observed order is 0.042. This is because the number of possible orderings of the four values is 4! (4 factorial), or 24, and one in 24 is 0.042.
The proportion of level IV words in error (36.4%) is also greater than that of the fluent patient YXF (13.1%); see footnote 32.
The 50th year of the Chinese republic, i.e., 1961.
This example also demonstrates the general difficulty LXZ has with the pre-verbal modification slot.
The omission and underemployment of de by this patient is discussed in section 3.1.5.
Richard Sproat has suggested the possibility of a topic-comment structure such as [wo yanjing] topic [zuobian de tuchu le]comment for this utterance. This possibility is discounted here because it assumes a structure such as [woyanjing] topic [zuobian de tuchu le]comment (where the [e]i marks an empty category resulting from the movement of the noun yanjing to a position within the topic), which would seem to involve complexity outside the capability of this patient. Furthermore, I followed the judgements of the interviewer and another Taiwan Mandarin informant for the interpretation offered here.
Richard Sproat points out that classifiers are the closest thing that Mandarin has to morphological agreement, and so the classifier deletion seen here may be considered parallel to the loss of agreement morphology in a language like Italian.
renshi is a semantic paraphasia for jide. Also, renshi takes an obligatory direct object in this context, which is omitted.
This is a good example of how difficult it is to unambiguously determine which constituent is ‘Responsible’ for the sentence being ungrammatical. For example, the sentence would also be acceptable if no past time expression were used (meaning ‘I don’t recognize (him) anymore’), or if it were not negated (meaning ‘I recognized (him) on Sunday’).
These findings are similar to those of Ulatowska et al. (1990).
Note, however, that use of the ‘generic’ classifier -ge is sometimes seen as marginally acceptable as a substitute for more specific classifiers.
Qiào biànzi’ stick up the braids’ is a slang expression referring to death in Mandarin.
Slang for an aborted pregnancy.
The incorrect classifier is discussed in the section on classifiers.
Once again, the use of the ‘generic’ classifier -ge is often marginally acceptable as a substitute for a more specific classifier.
This verbal paraphasia is discussed in the section on paraphasias.
My thanks to Chen Xiaoyu.
Note that the syllable din does not exist in Mandarin.
See Caplan et al. (1972), and Panzeri et al. (1990) for discussion of jargon roots used in proper word formation.
Viz., 36.4%. The difference between LXZ’s 36.4% and YXF’s 13.1% just misses statistical significance at the.05 level using a conservative two-tailed test: using the population proportion significance test, Z = 1.90, p <.06, two-tailed.
Edgar Zurif points out that this is no doubt an oversimplified view of the way such processing actually takes place. For example, syntactic structure building and lexical insertion may not be so easily dissociated.
My thanks to Bob Prank for this characterization of the phenomenon.
See section 3.3.3 for a discussion of the nature of this substitution error.
Just as in the fan qiè; system of spelling. See the analysis of Mandarin syllable structure in 2.1.3.
Colloquial Beijing Mandarin for nar ‘that place’.
The possibility that the lexical item da ‘to hit’ is what is substituted in the first syllable is remote, because there is no semantic or structural relation between this form and the target. Also, it would entail the substitution of an active verb for a stative verb in the formation of a complex noun, which is unlikely.
Bering dialect for keshi ‘but’.
Beijing dialect for ‘watch’.
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© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Packard, J.L. (1993). Speech Analysis. 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_3
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