Gender Agreement Processing in Transcortical Sensory Aphasia

EasyChair Preprint no. 6397

Abstract

Oral repetition in Transcortical Sensory Aphasia (TSA) has been shown to display linguistically informed altering of ungrammatical repetition stimuli, with a tendency to correct errors during repetition in spite of the absence of semantic comprehension. The present TSA single-case study, conducted in Italian, investigated the processing of linguistic Gender agreement errors through 8 oral repetition tasks, with the aim of investigating whether Gender agreement is among the linguistic facts that sensitivity is retained towards.

TST was a 78 y.o. female diagnosed as TSA, who sustained an ischemic lesion in the white matter in the left temporo-parietal and insular area. TST was administered 8 oral repetition tasks containing Gender agreement errors. Variables were introduced: animate/inanimate nouns; phrase/sentence agreement; Gender morphological (un)informativeness; common noun/proper name status; singular/plural, feminine/masculine nouns.

During repetition, TST made changes that were almost exclusively corrective (82/96) and mostly followed a left-to-right strategy (75/82). Among the introduced variables, those that gave significant effects were animate/inanimate nouns and phrase/sentence agreement only.

TST demonstrated intact syntactic abilities that served in carrying out Gender agreement corrective changes, adjusting the Gender of words that followed to that of words that preceded. In particular, Gender could be accessed for the purposes of agreement only in the case of animate nouns, suggesting that, Gender-wise, inflection on animate nouns might be qualitatively different from that of inanimate nouns, whose inflectional suffixes and related targets (i.e. definite articles) were never modified by TST: while the morphology of animate nouns carries a Gender value, the morphology of inanimate nouns might be an expression of morphological Class only. Inanimate nouns did not seem to bear the morphological realization of Gender on themselves.

Keyphrases: gender agreement, Gender morphology, oral repetition, transcortical sensory aphasia

@Booklet{EasyChair:6397,
  author = {Vittoria Dentella and Davide Bertocci and Carlo Semenza},
  title = {Gender Agreement Processing in Transcortical Sensory Aphasia},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6397},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}