Syntactic Scrambling in Broca's Aphasia: a Turkish Sample

Abstract

Introduction: Broca's aphasia (BA) is a language disorder that causes grammatical errors in the language production skills of patients. Contemporary studies revealed the fact that patients with BA (PBA) also have difficulty in analyzing the meaning of phrases and sentences and comprehending the real meaning of the discourse produced by the speaker. The purpose of this study was to investigate possible effect of syntactic movement by changing the word positions in the sentence with morphological markers in order to produce clauses without changing the meaning on the phrasal comprehension skills of Turkish-speaking patients with BA. Method: A total of 300 participants were divided as study (n = 150) and control (n = 150) groups between ages of 27-89. A test that included 20 relative clauses and 9 noun clauses (in total 29 phrases) was assigned to the PBA and the control group (CG). Relative clause phrases originated from simple sentences by adding suffixes to the verb as a function of Turkish morphology. Each suffix indicated a specific noun, object, or subject, and each figure in the test was related to one of them. A researcher asked participants to match the demanded clause with the 6 possibly related pictures for relative clause and 3 for noun clauses. Results: Findings indicated that BA patients in our study had a lack of comprehending relative clauses due to the syntactic movement of words in the object and subject positions. Compared to the responses of the CG, PBA had significantly lower scores when the object and subject positions have moved from their original positions. BA patients also obtained significantly lower scores in object type questions. Conclusion: Our findings support the fact that comprehension processing in PBA should be investigated profoundly to be able to understand the nature of the disorder in different languages. In Turkish, syntactic movement of words to form a relative clause caused the BA patients to have significant problems to assign the semantic roles to the words in the existence of movement or change in their original positions.