Different Behaviors of the Adjective DE and Possessive DE in the Production by Chinese Adults with Post-Stroke Aphasia

EasyChair Preprint 6788

Abstract

Introduction

This paper is going to investigate how the adjective DE and the possessive DE behave in the picture-naming production by Chinese aphasics. The adjective DE and the possessive DE are phonologically and orthographically identical in Mandarin Chinese (hereafter Chinese), but they occupy different positions in Chinese syntactic structures. It was hypothesized that Chinese aphasics would perform better in producing the adjective DE than the possessive DE as the latter involves more complex computations.  

Methods

We collected data from 20 participants aged between 41 and 79 (Mean=65.2,SD=12.1) and they are all from northern China. Among these participants, 13 are men whereas 7 are women. 6 people have received primary school education, 6 middle school education, 5 high school education and 2 junior college education. All of them have passed the acute phase and being of moderate illnessdegree now. 

Results

Participants’ production of the adjective DE (Mean=78.75, SD=27.24) is better than that of the possessive DE (Mean=53.75, SD=35.76) (p=0.02<0.05). To be specific, 17 people got higher accuracy rate in producing the adjective DE although three people (No.4, No. 6 and No.9) demonstrated no difference as for the two conditions. For the former 17 participants, all presented better production of the adjective DE than the possessive DE.

Conclusion

It can be drawn that Chinese-speaking post-stroke aphasics produced the adjective DE more accurately than the possessive DE, and significant difference can be found between them. The possessive DE involves more complex syntactic structure compared with that of the adjective DE, thus requiring more efforts to produce.

Keyphrases: different behaviors, stroke patients' Chinese, the adjective DE, the possessive DE

@booklet{EasyChair:6788,
  author    = {Shengnan Ma and Boping Yuan and Hui Chang},
  title     = {Different Behaviors of the Adjective DE and Possessive DE in the Production by Chinese Adults with Post-Stroke Aphasia},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6788},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}