Syntactic aspects of impaired speech in interface with prosody and information structure

Abstract

This paper aims at studying how the syntactic component of language develops in the speech of people with Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasia in interface with prosody and informational structure. The data consists of two short interviews in English with aphasic patients. Broca’s aphasia is characterized by the difficulty in processing and producing syntactic structures. In Wernicke’s aphasia, the semantic component is affected, which ends up generating a disconnected and meaningless speech. It was found that in Broca’s aphasia the patient marked some heads of English in final position – as head-final similar to languages like Japanese – instead of head-first, a common parameter of English. In Wernicke’s aphasia, there were some inadequacies in the use of adjuncts and complements that resulted in semantic anomalies.