Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 85. kötet (1983)

Tanulmányok - Gleason, Jean Berko: Insights from the Extraordinary: Some New Trends in American Psycholinguistics 140

144 JEAN BERK0 GLEASON Broca's area in the left anterior portion of the brain produces a syndrome that includes agrammatism andhalting, difficult speech composed primarily of short, télégraphie phrases. Such a patient may explain his weekend plans by saying : B-Boston College. Football. Saturday. Watchin' football. Damage to Wernicke's area in the left posterior portion of the brain leads to a kind of aphasie speech that is fluent, but appears empty. A patient with Wernicke's aphasia might explain his plans by saying : Well, y ou know, wére going to go there and we'll do it and then the thing, you know, the other one and ail those people, and the thing and up in the air, you know. . . Damage to the arcuate fasciculus is characterized by a specific inability to repeat aloud what one has heard. There are a number of other aphasias associated with lésions in other sites in the brain, and many patients exhibit mixed patterns of aphasia. Psycholinguistic research on aphasia has increased greatly in récent years, and the range of topics studies has broadened. When Goodglass and Blumstein published their volume Psycholinguistics and Aphasia in 1973, most of the topics treated were within the realm of the traditional : the book is divided into sections on phonology, syntax, semantics and lexicon. These studies provided a firm descriptive base. More recently, our own research team at the Aphasia Research Center of the Boston University School of Medicine has begun to look at other aspects of aphasie language. In one study, we hâve examined patients' ability to produce connected discourse (Gleason, Goodglass, Obier, Green, Hyde, and Weintraub 1980). We showed patients a séries of pictures and told them a simple story based on the pictures. We then asked them to retell the stories, which we compared with stories told by a control group of non-aphasie patients. We found that although the Wernicke's subjects produced as many total words as the normal speakers, the normal speakers retold four times as many content words from the stories ; this may explain why the speech of Wernicke's aphasies appears to be 'empty'. Broca's subjects produced only one third as many words as either normal or Wernicke's subjects, but just as many target lexemes from the stories as the Wernicke's aphasies. In gênerai, the aphasie narratives contained few thèmes, few target lexemes, and many pronouns without antécédents. The subjects with différent clinical diagnoses also produced stories with différent eharacteristics. Studies of this type provide new insights into the kinds of linguistic déficits caused by left hémisphère brain damage. As we hâve begun to look at the many skills involved in communicative compétence, which is a broader concept than linguistic compétence, studies of aphasia are becoming increasingly diverse. Cross cultural work on aphasia is also an area that is of increasing interest. There has been much work done on aphasia in English, French, Russian and Germán speakers. There hâve also been a few widely published studies of Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Chinese aphasias. Work on Hungárián aphasia is less well known but not less important. The study of aphasia can help to validate linguistic models ; for instance, there is a gênerai assumption that parts of the language that are differentially affected in aphasia are also separately represented in the linguistic Systems of normal speakers. Thus, if an aphasie patient produces noun stem without plural markers, we assume that nouns and inflections are represented separately. It is also likely that the hierarchical inner ordering of language in normal speakers is revealed by patterns of loss in aphasia. In Hungárián, for instance, it would be instructive to learn which of the