文章基本信息

标题：The Auditory Comprehension of Who and Which Questions in People with and without Aphasia: Which Account do the Data Support?
本地全文：下载
作者：S. MacKenzie ; S. MacKenzie ; M. Walenski 等
期刊名称：Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences
印刷版ISSN：1877-0428
出版年度：2013
卷号：94
页码：139-140
DOI：10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.09.067
语种：English
出版社：Elsevier
摘要：This study investigated the comprehension of various types of IT/z-questions in neurologicallyunimpaired adults and adults with Broca’s aphasia. Evidence from linguistic and psycholinguisticliterature suggests that Which-NP structures are more difficult to understand thanWho/What-questions and within those, that object-extracted are more difficult than subjectextracted. Using a unique eye tracking-while listening method coupled with a three-figure picture,we examined four specific hypotheses regarding WH-question comprehension: the Discoursehypothesis, the Retrieval Hypothesis, the Canonicity Hypothesis, and the Intervener Hypothesis. The“ Discourse hypothesis” is supported by evidence that Which-NP questions are more difficult toprocess for neurologically healthy participants than Who questions because they must refer to anindividual taken from a set of entities previously mentioned in the discourse (Donkers & Stowe,2006; Shapiro, 2000). The “ Retrieval hypothesis” makes the opposite claim; that because Which-NPconstructions contain specific information that speeds memory retrieval, in relation to their Whoquestion counterparts (Hofmeister, 2007). There is also evidence that across the two question types,object-extracted questions are more difficult to understand than subject-extracted questions becausethe former are in non-canonical word order. We call this the “ Canonicity Hypothesis.” Finally, the“ Intervener hypothesis” claims that interveners can account for processing differences between Whoand Which-NP questions (Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2011). An intervener is an NPthat has similarproperties to other NPs in the sentence, and thus interferes with the assignment of thematic roles.Only Which-NP object-extracted questions contain an intervener, and this could explain why theyhave been found to be more difficult to process relative to other Wh-questions. We examined thesefour hypotheses using a unique eye tracking-while listening method coupled with a three-figurepicture. Our initial results for our healthy controls revealed offline support for a CanonicityHypothesis - where object-extracted who and which-NP questions took longer to resolve thansubject-extracted versions (Figure l .A). Our initial unimpaired gaze data results show the samepattern across all conditions with significantly more gazes to the correct than the incorrect referent(Figure l .B). This sets the stage to compare the data from unimpaired participants to patients withBroca’s aphasia.