The Manifestation of Pronoun Use in Turkish Non-Fluent Aphasia

EasyChair Preprint no. 6356

Abstract

Pronouns have been shown to be impacted in speech production of persons with aphasia (PWA). Earlier spontaneous speech studies showed different trends across different languages by reporting omissions of pronominal elements or overuse of pronouns in languages with rich inflection paradigms. Difficulty with pronouns seems to be largely heterogeneous across different pronoun categories. Turkish is a richly inflected language with a large case-marking paradigm, and it allows object and subject dropping. This study investigates the appraisal of pronoun variables in Turkish PWA’s spontaneous speech production. Spontaneous speech narratives from 10 PWA and 10 non-brain-damaged controls reported in Arslan et al. (2016) were used in the current study. Different pronoun categories were evaluated as well as the number of pronoun droppings. Case-marked pronouns were tallied and used in a subsequent analysis. We found that Turkish-speaking PWA have an elevated number of pronouns, pronoun-to-noun, and pronoun-to-word ratios, but not total number of nouns. Production of object and subject personal pronouns was found to be within the control norms. The PWA produced a large number of demonstrative and indefinite pronouns. These suggest that Turkish, PWA overuse pronouns as a strategy to avoid the retrieval of nouns with complex morphology as also evidenced in many languages with complex inflectional paradigms. The PWA produced an increased number of pronoun dropping in both object and subject positions in comparison to the controls. This finding is consistent with general characteristics of non-fluent aphasia in Turkish with reduced complexity and length in utterances produced. Reflexive and interrogative pronouns were used very infrequently in both groups, however, PWA produced the former less than the controls. Further analysis showed that the PWA produced all case-marked pronouns within the control norms.

Keyphrases: non-fluent aphasia, pronoun production, spontaneous speech production, Turkish

@Booklet{EasyChair:6356,
  author = {Ayşenur Akyüz and Seçkin Arslan},
  title = {The Manifestation of Pronoun Use in Turkish Non-Fluent Aphasia},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6356},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}