Production and comprehension deficit in Broca's Aphasia: A test in Bengali

Abstract

This thesis aims to examine the nature of language production and comprehension deficits of Bengali speaking Broca’s aphasics. Two grammatical aspects have been the focus of the present research: postpositions and word order. Two tests were designed and performed on Bengali speaking aphasics. A task related to postposition was aimed at production deficits whereas a task on variation of word order concentrated on comprehension deficits. The results show that the Broca’s aphasics face more difficulties in both tasks than normal speakers of Bengali. The results of the comprehension task involving word order show that the people suffering from Broca’s aphasia cannot deal with the complexity of alternative word orders. Apparently, movement in the syntactic tree creates complications for the Broca’s aphasics. In particular the OVS construction of sentences with ‘distractor’ and ‘opposite’ pictures shows more marked results than other constructions.