Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
STUDIES IN PSYCHOLOGY-PSIKOLOJI CALISMALARI DERGISI, sa.1, ss.125-142, 2024 (ESCI)
Aphasia is an acquired language disorder that impacts all language abilities, rendering normal communicationextremely difficult. Grammatical processing is often impaired in aphasia. Pronouns are often found to beeffortful, with difficulty interpreting to whom a pronoun might refer. This study aimed to investigate whetherinterpreting pronouns and reflexives with and without potential quantified antecedents (i.e., "Every rabbit /Rabbit is pointing at itself/it/monkey") are impaired in aphasia in Turkish, and whether quantifier spreadingerrors occur during pronoun/reflexive processing. A total of 12 people with aphasia (PWA) (two females, M-age=59.7,SD= 14.55) and 15 age-matched healthy controls were recruited and asked to listen to 24 sentences inconditions of non-quantified and quantified subjects in which different referential and pronominal variables werecontrolled for (pronoun, reflexive, and R-expression). These participants were admitted to a picture-sentencematching paradigm with an end-of-trial truth-value judgment task. They were presented with a picture whicheither matched or mismatched the sentence contexts, and they were asked to respond. Their accuracy andresponse times were recorded and analyzed using mixed-effects regression models. The findings showedthat the PWA performed more poorly and slowly than the control group and that both the groups performedmore slowly responding to the quantified subjects than non-quantified ones. The PWA made interpretationerrors in mismatch conditions, particularly for quantified subjects, evoking longer response times comparedto non-quantified subjects. In conclusion, this study showed that quantifier spreading errors are observed inTurkish aphasia, which does not necessarily depend on pronominal/anaphoric resolution. It is suggested thatthe PWA's sentence interpretation difficulty was underlined in two forms of separate impairments: interpretingquantifier scope and impairments in resolving pronominal/anaphoric elements.