25. Mrz 2025
Rachel Hatchard
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
Making reference with language disorder:
A usage-based study of noun phrases in aphasia
Gemeinsame Veranstaltung mit dem Institut für Romanistik der Universität Wien.
Abstract: Reference is fundamental to human communication and is very commonly effected using noun phrases (NPs) (e.g. Serratrice & De Cat, 2020). What happens to this linguistic device, however, when the language system is disrupted, leaving the speaker less able to retrieve or assemble utterances? This is the situation facing people with the most commonly acquired language disorder in adults: aphasia.
Very little work has investigated whole NPs in aphasia, and none has done so from a usage-based perspective, considering how usage can be shaped by more domain-general/contextual factors, such as frequency. This perspective has brought wide-ranging insight to other language areas (e.g. child language; Ambridge & Lieven, 2011), but is only just gaining traction in aphasiology (e.g., Hatchard, 2021; Hatchard & Lieven, 2019; Martínez-Ferreiro et al., 2020). The approach proposes that whole-form storage and processing can occur beyond the word level, and would predict that NPs are built up and entrenched in the mind gradually, in a piecemeal manner.
This study applies a usage-based perspective to examine how the following vary with spoken language capability in spoken Cinderella narratives from 12 people with various aphasia ‘types’/ severities: percentage use of noun versus pronoun heads; NP elaboration (the number of components and component types in the phrases); NP productivity (the flexibility with which speakers can produce NPs with varying lexis); and any relative preservation of particular component types over others.
The analyses indicate that rather than differing categorically by aphasia type, the people with aphasia vary along a continuum, whereby with greater spoken language capability, there is increasing use of pronoun over noun heads, and greater NP elaboration and productivity, with less reliance on more frequent and likely ‘fixed’ NPs. Moreover, with more severe spoken language impairment, heads are the most preserved NP component, followed by determiners and/then pre-modifiers, then post-modifiers. This ordering approximately mirrors the order of acquisition of NP components by children (see Eisenberg et al., 2008), supporting the usage-based view of NPs being built up and entrenched gradually. The talk also explains how the usage/omission of particular components observed along the participant continuum may reduce meaning in different ways. Results are discussed in relation to both the development of linguistic theory and aphasia assessment/treatment.
References
Ambridge, B. & Lieven, E. V. M. (2011). Child Language Acquisition: Contrasting Theoretical Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Eisenberg, S. L., Ukrainetz, T. A., Hsu, J. R., Kaderavek, J. N., Justice, L. M. & Gillam, R. B. (2008). Noun phrase elaboration in children's spoken stories. Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 39(2), 145–157.
Hatchard, R. (2021). Cognitive Aphasiology - A usage-based approach to language in aphasia. (Constructional Approaches to Language 31). Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Hatchard, R. & Lieven, E. (2019). Inflection of nouns for grammatical number in spoken narratives by people with aphasia: How glass slippers challenge the rule-based approach. Language and Cognition 11(3). 341–372.
Martínez-Ferreiro, S., Bastiaanse, S. & Boye, K. (2020). Functional and usage-based approaches to aphasia: The grammatical-lexical distinction and the role of frequency. Aphasiology 34(8), 927-942.
Serratrice, L. & De Cat, C. (2020). Individual differences in the production of referential expressions: The effect of language proficiency, language exposure and executive function in bilingual and monolingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 23(2), 371-386.