A Study On Functional Category Deficits Of Mandarin-Speaking Agrammatics

Cross-linguistic studies reveal that people with Broca's aphasia(PWBA)exhibit functional category deficits in both comprehension and production.However,not all the functional categories are equally impaired.It is largely evidenced that CP-and TP-related functional categories are more vulnerable.A number of hypotheses,linguistic or nonlinguistic,have been formulated to account for these diverging deficit patterns.However,these hypotheses have dominantly focused on the inflected languages with inadequate evidence from other uninflected languages like Chinese.Until now there has been no consensus among researcher as to the nature of functional deficits in aphasia.Impaired hierarchy account ascribes the deficits to truncation of higher functional projections.Trace deleted account assumes that traces are impaired in derivation of movement.Feature specification account posits that tense features are underspecified without blocking of higher functional projection.Similar account further assumes that interpretable features are more impaired than uninterpretable features.Word order account emphasizes that derived order sentences are more impaired.Non-linguistic accounts capitalize on resource limitations of sentence processing.Against this background,this study seeks to investigate the relationship between accessibility of Chinese functional categories and degrees of severity of impairment,and relationship between the recovery process of Chinese PWBA and accessibility of functional categories.On the basis of the Chinese data,this study also dubs an alternative account.Additionally,this study sheds light on Chinese linguistics.Two studies were conducted in this dissertation.Twenty-two Chinese PWBA and ten NBD participated in the synchronic study.Their productions of functional categories are examined in spontaneous speech.Findings show that AspP/TP is better preserved whereas CP and vP are impaired,particularly vP is heavily impaired.It is found that degrees of severity of impairment are associated with the gap between the nodes.One Chinese agrammatics participated in the longitudinal study.His performance on functional categories in recovery process was tested across grammaticality judgment,comprehension,and production tasks.Findings show that CP and vP have been recovered faster than AspP/TP with vP most dynamic during recovery process.CP stabilizes first whereas AspP/TP is the slowest one.The two studies evidence that 1)AspP/TP in Chinese agrammatism is not badly impaired,2)vP is heavily impaired,3)CP manifests a mixed pattern.Additionally,this study reveals that generally comprehension and grammaticality judgment are better than production of functional categories.Also,for Chinese PWBA past time is better than future time.None of the extant hypotheses are totally amenable to the Chinese data in this study.Hence this study suggests an alternative account based on the phase theory.This account assumes that impaired vP underlie CP-and TP-related deficits.Besides,this study expounds some implications for Chinese linguistics.This study contributes to agrammatic studies by providing data from the uninflected Chinese language.Furthermore,this study sheds light on Chinese linguistics with agrammatic data.Last,this study provides implications for clinician's assessment and treatment of aphasia.