Syntactic, phonological and semantic influence on sentence production/comprehension in brain damaged and normal people

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370493
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Prefectural University of Hiroshima
• Principal Investigator: Watanabe Masumi 県立広島大学, 保健福祉学部(三原キャンパス), 准教授 (60285971)
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 動詞活用 / 自他対応動詞 / 失語症 / 呼称

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Aphasia occurs from damage to the language related area of the left hemisphere of the brain. Aphasics have a variety of language difficulties including sentence production and word finding. We examined verb inflection which plays a key role in sentence production. Japanese verbs have two types of inflectional changes, Type I and II, each of which has inherent word final three phonemes. Since some of Type I verbs have the same word final phoneme sequences as those of Type II, their inflectional changes cannot be determined by their word endings. Participants responded slower and made much errors in inflecting those with inconsistent endings.
As for aphasia we found difficulty in comprehending sentences including intransitive verbs with transitive counterparts sharing identical stems (e.g., sim-a-ru/sim-e-ru [close)], since those verbs are phonologically confusing and intransitive sentences have syntactically complex structures.
We also examined factors facilitating object-naming.

Free Research Field

神経言語学