Processing of Reflexive Anaphors in Turkish Aphasia: an Eye-Tracking During Listening Study

EasyChair Preprint no. 6435

Abstract

Introduction. People with aphasia (PWA) present impairments working out who pronominal elements refer to (Arslan, Devers, & Ferreiro, 2021). Turkish has a curious case of two types of reflexives: kendi ‘oneself’ which is assumed to behave as a local reflexive and kendisi which is rather unconstrained in its behavior. This study examines whether and how Turkish reflexive system is affected in aphasia. Methods. Four individuals with non-fluent aphasia and 22 controls were recruited. An eye-movement monitoring during listening experiment was administered in which the participants listened to 48 sentences across four conditions. A two-by-two fully crossed design was used; we manipulated contextual referential bias to local/non-local antecedents being potentially bound by kendi and kendisi reflexive elements. Results. The data have shown that the PWA had a strong non-local interpretation for both the reflexive conditions, while the controls considered local antecedents for ‘kendi’ more frequently than ‘kendisi’ reflexives. We found that for kendi reflexive, the PWA had reduced target fixations in both local and non-local antecedents than the controls. For kendisi, we found no group differences in local fixations while the controls significantly fixated more often on non-local antecedents than the PWA did. Conclusions. This study explored the moment-by-moment processing of reflexive anaphors in Turkish aphasia. One conclusion is that the PWA resort themselves to a non-local interpretation of reflexive anaphors, signalling that the locality constraint on kendi reflexive, is only loosely applied in syntactic comprehension in aphasia.

Keyphrases: Eye-movement monitoring, non-fluent aphasia, pronoun processing, sentence comprehension

@Booklet{EasyChair:6435,
  author = {Seçkin Arslan and Semra Selvi Balo and İlknur Maviş},
  title = {Processing of Reflexive Anaphors in Turkish Aphasia: an Eye-Tracking During Listening Study},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6435},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}