An investigation of metalinguistic judgments in Broca's aphasia
Thompson-Smith, Tina
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/22363
Description
Title
An investigation of metalinguistic judgments in Broca's aphasia
Author(s)
Thompson-Smith, Tina
Issue Date
1989
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Simpson, Robert K.
Department of Study
Communication
Discipline
Communication
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Speech Communication
Language
eng
Abstract
This study investigated the ability of people with Broca's aphasia to make metalinguistic judgments concerning what was or was not a violation of linguistic rule usage within both the semantic and syntactic domains. A total of 20 white agrammatic and normal speakers, ages 33 to 78, were asked to judge, revise, and explain a corpus of sentences on a set of formal (created by the examiner) and informal (subject's spontaneous errors) tasks. The results of this study showed that the control and mild aphasic subjects were able to judge, revise, and explain sentences significantly better than the moderate aphasic subjects across all formal tasks for absolute and relative values. All subjects were able to judge, revise, and explain semantically anomalous utterances significantly better than ungrammatical utterances on the formal tasks for absolute values. Analysis of relative scores, however, revealed no significant utterance type effect.
On the informal task for absolute values, the control and mild aphasic subjects judged, revised, and explained ungrammatical utterances significantly better than the moderate aphasic subjects. The control group also performed significantly better than this group on anomalous utterances on the correction tasks and the multiple-choice explanation measure. All subjects, in addition, performed significantly better on ungrammatical than anomalous utterances on the correction tasks.
On the informal tasks for relative values, the control and mild aphasic groups performed significantly better than the moderate aphasic subjects on the correction tasks on ungrammatical utterances. There was no significant subject effect or utterance type effect on the explanation tasks. In addition, only the control group differed significantly from the moderate aphasic group on anomalous utterances, but this behavior occurred only on the correction tasks.
These results suggest that type of task, severity of aphasia, and utterance type are variables that affect the subject's ability to judge, revise, and explain deviant utterances. Metalinguistic abilities, therefore, should be assessed as a part of a standard aphasia test battery and enhanced in intervention to teach the client to self-monitor and self-correct his error, thus promoting better communication skills.
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