Assessing Syntactic Deficits in Chinese Broca's aphasia using the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences-Chinese (NAVS-C)

Abstract

Background: English-speaking patients with Broca's aphasia and agrammatism evince difficulty with complex grammatical structures, including verbs and sentences. A few studies have found similar patterns among Chinese-speaking patients with broca's aphasia, despite structural differences between these two languages. However, no studies have explicitly examined verb properties, including the number and optionality of arguments (participant roles) selected by the verb, and only a few studies have examined sentence deficits among Chinese patients. In addition, there are no test batteries presently available to assess syntactically important properties of verbs and sentences in Chinese patients.

Aims: This study used a Chinese version of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS; Thompson, 2011), originally developed for English speakers with aphasia, to examine the verb and sentence deficit patterns among Chinese speakers with aphasia. As in the original NAVS, the Chinese version (NAVS-C) assessed verbs by the number and optionality of arguments as well as sentence canonicity, in the both production and comprehension.

Methods and procedures: Fifteen Chinese patients with Broca's aphasia and fifteen age-matched healthy normal controls participated in this study. All NAVS-C tests were administered, in which participants were asked either to produce or identify verbs and sentences coinciding with action pictures.

Outcomes & results: Despite grammatical differences between Chinese and English, the impairment caused by structural complexity of verbs and sentences was replicated in Chinese-speaking patients using the NAVS-C. Verbs with more arguments were significantly more impaired than those with fewer arguments and verbs with optional arguments were significantly more impaired than those with obligatory arguments. One deviation from English-speaking patients, however, is that the Chinese-speaking patients exhibited greater difficulty with subject relative clauses than with object relative clauses because the former, rather than the latter, involve non-canonical order in Chinese. Similar to English-speaking patients, Chinese patients exhibited more difficulty with object extracted wh-questions than with subject extracted wh-questions. Suggesting that wh-movement in Logical Form may also cause processing difficulty. Moreover, Chinese-speaking patients exhibited similar performance in both production and comprehension, indicating the deficits in both modalities.

Conclusions: The number and optionality of verb arguments as well as canonicity of the Agent-Theme order in sentences impacts Chinese-speaking individuals with aphasia as it does in the case of English-speaking patients. These findings indicate that the NAVS-C is a useful tool for detailing deficit patterns associated with syntactic processing in patients with aphasia cross-linguistically.

Keywords: Chinese aphasia; NAVS; Syntactic complexity; aphasia assessment; verb argument structure.

Figures

Figure 1

Sample stimuli for the Verb Naming Test (VNT) by verb type. (a) one-argument verb (target verb: 跑 ‘run’); (b) two-argument verb (target verb: 拉 ‘pull’); (c) three-argument verb (target verb: 给 ‘give’)

Figure 2

Sample stimuli for the Verb Comprehension Test (VCT) (from top left to bottom right, same verb distractor: 搬‘move’; different verb distractors: 抱‘hug’ and 喂‘feed’; target: 拉 ‘pull’).

Figure 3

Sample stimuli for the Argument Structure Production Test (ASPT). (3a) optional two-argument verb with two arguments (target: 弟弟追汽车‘The younger brother is chasing the car.’); (3b) optional two-argument verb with one argument (target: 弟弟追‘The younger brother is chasing.’)

Figure 4

Sample stimuli for the Sentence Production Priming Test (SPPT) and the Sentence Comprehension Test (SCT). (a) Sample stimulus for testing actives, passives, subject extracted wh-questions and object extracted wh-questions (SWQ target: 谁喂女孩 ‘Who is feeding the girl?’; OWQ target: 男孩喂谁 ‘Who is the boy feeding?’); (b) Sample stimulus for testing subject relative clauses and object relative clauses (SR target: 张三看见喂女孩的男孩 ‘Zhangsan saw the boy who is feeding the girl.’; OR target: 张三看见男孩喂的女孩 ‘Zhangsan saw the girl who the boy is feeding.’)

Figure 5

Mean percentage of correct verbs by type (1-, 2- and 3- argument) for patients (*** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05). (a) Verb Naming Test (VNT) scores, (b) Verb Comprehension Test (VCT) scores.

Figure 6

Mean percentage of correct verbs by type (1-, 2- and 3-argument) for patients in the ASPT (*** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05).

Figure 7

Mean percentage of correct sentences by type for patients. (a) Sentence Production Priming Test (SPPT) scores; (b) Sentence Comprehension test (SCT) scores. Act = active, PAS = passive, SWQ = subject extracted wh-question, OWQ = object extracted wh-question, SR = subject relative clause, OR = object relative clause. (*** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05).

Figure 7

Mean percentage of correct sentences by type for patients. (a) Sentence Production Priming Test (SPPT) scores; (b) Sentence Comprehension test (SCT) scores. Act = active, PAS = passive, SWQ = subject extracted wh-question, OWQ = object extracted wh-question, SR = subject relative clause, OR = object relative clause. (*** p < .001, ** p < .01, * p < .05).