Sentence Comprehension of Korean - Speaking Adults with Broca's Aphasia

Hwang, Mina

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2002;7(2): 65-85.

Mina Hwang^`

황민아(Mina Hwang)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the characteristics of language impairment of Korean - speaking adult s with Broca s aphasia. Korean is different from other standard European languages in it s strong reliance on grammatical morphemes to signal grammatical relations of words in a sentence. A variety of noun suffixes are used to mark cases in Korean. Use of these case-marker s permit s relative freedom of word order in Korean, although the canonical order of SOV is used most frequently . Given the fact that most researches on aphasia have been carried out in European languages (especially , English ), the language impairment s of Korean - speaking aphasics may not be con sistent with the findings of previous researches. T en Korean - speaking adult s with Broca s aphasia and 15 normal adult s were tested to determine relative sparing and impairment of grammatical morphology , word order , and semantic information in a sentence interpretation task. As normal adult s, the cue that the adult s with aphasia relied mostly on in sentence interpretation was grammatical morphology , followed by semantic information, and word order at the last . In other words, Korean - speaking adult s with Broca s aphasia were able to process grammatical morphemes even more than semantic information or word order . T hese result s are not con sistent with the notion of selective loss of grammatical mor - phology in Broca s aphasia based on the findings from English - speaking aphasic adult s. T he importance of cross - linguistic differences of language breakdown s in aphasic adult s was discus sed.

Keywords: 실어증 | 문장이해 | 단서 강도