Comprehension of Complex Sentences in The Persian-Speaking Patients With Aphasia

Abstract

Introduction: To study sentence comprehension in Persian-speaking Patients with Aphasia considering the factors of complexity. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the performance of 6 non-fluent aphasic patients were tested and their performance was compared to 15 matched control group. Comprehension of semantically reversible sentences was assessed using a binary sentence-picture matching task. The stimuli were as follows: clefts; subject clefts and object clefts, also relative clauses; subject relatives and object relatives. All of them were types of movement-derived structures and also simple declarative sentences as the control task. Results: The best performance of aphasic patients were seen in the comprehension of subject clefts, although prior to this result we assumed that simple declarative sentences (in which there is no structural factor of complexity) can be understood easily. They showed the highest difficulty in the comprehension of object relatives. Furthermore, the performance of patients in the comprehension of relative clauses was significantly weaker than understanding the clefts. Conclusion: The outcomes of this study suggest that the sentence comprehension deficits of aphasic patients, in contrast to the specific deficit models, may not be related to linguistic disabilities. Moreover, the problems in the comprehension of non-canonical sentences may be related to failure in the allocation of attention. Finally, our results support the claims that neural characterization of the cognitive resources (e.g. working memory) is disrupted in sentence comprehension deficits.

Canonicity Effect on Sentence Processing of Persian-speaking Broca’s Patients

“…Second, unlike most former researchers (Byng, 1988;Caplan et al, 2007;Meyer & Thompson, 2012;Wassenaar & Hagoort, 2007) adopting some methodological changes, this study has combined two different grammatical judgment and sentence to picture matching tasks to increase the validity of the research and testify more efficiently the predictions of mapping hypothesis given its proposed double stage syntactic semantic model. Third, it's noteworthy to mention, as of now although there have been only a few researches in Persian context analyzing the performance of Broca's aphasics in sentence comprehension (Mehriet al, 2016;Nilipour, 2000;Raghibdoust, 1999), they have neither attempted to utilize mapping hypothesis for the justification of subjects' performance nor did they combine diverse tasks for the explanation of their subjects' comprehension (Salehnejad & Shekaramiz, 2016;Shiani et al, 2019) casting doubt on the validity of their research. Given these considerations, the necessity of conducting this research in Persian setting seems compulsory and essential to depict a more realistic picture of the nature of grammatical deficits in these patients.…”

“…Third, it is noteworthy to mention that as of now although there have been only a few studies in the Persian context analyzing the performance of Broca's aphasics in sentence comprehension ( Mehri, et al, 2016 ; Nilipour, 2000 ; Raghibdoust, 1999 ), they have neither attempted to utilize mapping hypothesis for the justification of subjects’ performance nor did they combine diverse tasks for the explanation of their subjects’ comprehension ( Salehnejad & Shekaramiz, 2016 ; Shiani et al, 2019 ) casting doubt on the validity of their research. Given these considerations, the necessity of conducting this research in a Persian setting seems compulsory and essential to depict a more realistic picture of the nature of grammatical deficits in these patients.…”