The Pragmatic Basis of Aphasia

A Neurolinguistic Study of Morphosyntax Among Bilinguals

Marc L. Schnitzer

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138989719
• eBook ISBN: 9781317785446
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This language study's primary purpose is to use aphasic performance to understand language, rather than to use linguistic analysis to understand aphasia. Examining the detailed nature of linguistic performance of bilingual aphasics in a variety of "natural" and metalinguistic tasks, the book reports the results of a study of morphology and syntax among Spanish-English bilingual and monolingual hispanophones in Puerto Rico.

1 Introduction

Aphasic errors do not carry their linguistic interpretation with them.

—John C. Marshall

Most studies of bilinguals and polyglots afflicted with aphasia have focused attention on differential cerebral localization or hemispheric lateralization (e.g., Albert & Obler, 1978; Galloway, 1983), or patterns of recovery (e.g., Paradis, 1977; Paradis, Goldblum, & Abidi, 1982; also see Paradis (1983) for reissue of older case reports). The present study differs from previous studies of bilingual aphasia in that it is concerned primarily not with the characteristics of the aphasics (12 Spanish-English bilinguals and 9 monolingual hispanophones) in relation to their linguistic performance, but rather with the detailed nature of their linguistic performance in a variety of “natural” and metalinguistic tasks. It is a study of language rather than of aphasia, in the tradition of Harold Goodglass (e.g., Goodglass, 1968; Goodglass & Berko, 1960; Goodglass & Hunt, 1958), in which aphasics are subjected to a variety of formal tests, but different from Goodglass’s work in that its primary purpose is to use aphasic performance to understand language rather than to use linguistic analysis to understand aphasia. The present study is not primarily a linguistic analysis of aphasia, but rather an aphasiological analysis of language.

As Jason Brown (1977, 1979, 1980, 1982) has claimed, pathology reveals function at a lower neurological and cognitive level, in his theory of “microgenesis,” which adopts the position that “a set of psychological and brain levels forms a substructure within a behavior as it unfolds over evolutionary and maturational stages” (1982, p. 44). Distinguishing among four phylogenetic and ontogenetic levels of neuroanatomical form and cognitive function—sensorimotor (subcortical), presentational (limbic), representational (neocortical), and symbolic (asymmetric, neocortical)—he claims that each higher level is a “differentiation of an earlier less specified stage” (1977, p. 24). He also states that neuropathology can reveal the mode in which more primitive stages function, because for Brown a symptom, rather than being viewed as a deficiency, is “like a window into the component the damaged area supports” (1982, p. 448). I use the word “mode” because, although it is not Brown’s term, it underlines the kinship between Brown’s levels and Talmy Givón’s (1979) communicative continuum.

Givón, whose principal concern is not brain function, distinguishes among three communicative modes: monopropositional, pragmatic, and syntactic, which constitute the three cardinal points in a phylogenetic and ontogenetic continuum. The monopropositional mode is used by canines, pongids, and human babies and may be used by normal adult human beings under special circumstances. This mode is found as well in severe aphasia. The monopropositional mode is restricted in time and space to the “here and now.” It is restricted with respect to subject-agent to you and I, (agent and recipient-benefactive are not coded, but rather presupposed), and with respect to referents, to currently perceivable concrete objects. In illocutionary force it is restricted to the imperative, or more properly speaking, the manipulative.

The pragmatic mode, which is the communicative mode of pidgins, evolves into the syntactic mode as pidgins evolve into creoles. This pragmatic mode, according to Givón, is intermediate in child language development between the monopropositional stage and the full-fledged syntactic mode. It begins as the child begins to use two-word utterances. In the pragmatic mode, there is a tendency to use topic-comment structure, rather than the subject-predicate structure typical of the syntactic mode. Conjunction is the more common approach to combination of clauses in the pragmatic mode, with little or no subordination, the latter process being restricted to the syntactic mode.

Other characteristics of Givón’s pragmatic mode are slow rate of delivery with multiple intonation contours (as opposed to the rapid rate of the syntactic mode in which utterances are contained within a single contour). Word order is controlled by the pragmatic principle of old information first, new information last (as compared to the syntactic mode, in which thematic and semantic relations govern word order). In the pragmatic mode, there is roughly a one-to-one ratio of verbs to nouns, with the proportion of nouns predominating in the syntactic mode. Inflectional morphology is characteristic of the syntactic mode and is not found in the pragmatic mode.

In addition to these salient features that characterize the three communicative modes, Givón discusses a process that he calls morphologization, a process of change in the syntactic mode, in which syntactic elements become cliticized into bound morphemes. There is then a further tendency for these morphemes to become gradually eroded by phonological processes, which then necessitates the introduction of new syntactic elements—presumably to preserve intelligibility and prevent information loss.

The two languages that the present study is concerned with illustrate this phenomenon. The phonologically more conservative dialects of Spanish tend not to use subject pronouns, because verb endings signal person and number, but in Puerto Rican Spanish, which tends to elide final /s/s¹ (which distinguish second person from third person singular when at the end of appropriate verb forms), there is a marked tendency to use personal subject pronouns, especially for second person in the present, imperfect, future, and conditional indicative, and present and past subjunctive forms, where the elimination of final /s/ leads to ambiguity. Modern English, which has very little person-marking morphology on verbs requires the use of explicit pronouns.

This hierarchical evolutionary approach to language is paralleled by the neurological approaches of Brown (1977, 1979, 1980, 1982) noted earlier, Lamendella (1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1979), and Goldstein (1933, 1948, 1959). These three share the view that the nervous system is organized hierarchically (cf. Hayek, 1952; Jackson, 1958) and that brain damage can reveal function at a more primitive level of neuropsychological organization. Thus for Brown, who takes issue with the “modular” localizationist approach to interpretation of aphasic symptomatology, it makes no sense to speak of the “loss” of a function that may be “regained” a few minutes later. Rather, neuropathology gives rise to the operation of the nervous system at a lower evolutionary or maturational level.

In a similar vein, Lamendella (op. cit.) views the linguistic system as part of a hierarchy in which neopallial systems exercise control over the limbic system, inhibiting certain functions in the latter (1977a, p. 196). He believes that the forebrain limbic systems constitute the basic level of human communication (somewhat along the lines of Givón’s monopropositional mode). By about 1 year of age, children develop neocortically based conceptual systems that involve thematic relations (this level akin to Givón’s pragmatic mode). From about 20 months of age, the child begins to use morphosyntactic means to encode the lower level conceptualizations (Lamendella, 1976, 1977b). The child has at this point arrived at the equivalent of Givón’s syntactic mode.

Goldstein (1933, 1948, 1959) had long argued along lines similar to these regarding neuropathology. Although not antilocalizationist in the sense of believing neuropathology in any area equally likely to result in a given kind of symptomatology, Goldstein believed that aphasia was attributable to what he called a “basic defect” in which the patient was reduced to functioning in terms of “concrete” rather than “abstract” language, due to an inability to assume the “abstract attitude.” This conception of the problem obviously parallels a conception involving a regression to a representational or even presentational level in Brown’s system, to a limbic level in Lamendella’s system, and to the pragmatic mode in Givón’s system.

Recently Lebrun and Buyssens (1982) have proposed revising Goldstein’s terminology from concrete and abstract attitudes to language and metalanguage, respectively, Thus, for Lebrun and Buyssens, the “basic defect” is an inability to use metalanguage. In spie of their stated definition of metalanguage as “use of language to refer to language itself or to any part of it” (p. 21), in fact their use of the term goes beyond what is generally meant in the literature by “metalinguistic performance”. For example, for Lebrun and Buyssens, object naming would constitute a metalinguistic task if it were clear to the subject that (s)he was involved in a task of object naming. Thus they refer to a patient cited by Goldstein (1948, p. 61–63) who could not name animals on request, yet could do so when imagining the animals at the local zoo. In the latter situation she did not name the category “bear”, but rather “polar bear,” “brown bear,” and so on.

Clearly Goldstein, Brown, Lamendella, and Givón are not making identical claims. I present them here together because they are obviously alike in their Jacksonian postulation that observed normal language behavior is at the summit of a hierarchy of functions.² A disruption of the hierarchy can result in symptoms that represent a lower overall level of function. Of the four, Givón has not made specific neurological claims. Draizar (1982) however, has recently carried the Givónian approach into the realm of aphasiology and experimental neurolinguistics.

Because one of Givón’s prime concerns is language change (as much in the traditional sense of historical-comparative linguistic studies, as in the related senses of language acquisition and creolization), Draizar studied two groups of aphasics, each of which performed a picture-description task and a free discourse “task.” Each group was subjected to Melodic Intonation Therapy (Sparks, Helm, & Albert, 1974), a kind of deblocking procedure (e.g., Weigl, 1968, 1970, 1974; Weigl & Bierwisch, 1970) in which the clinician began by singing or humming a melody. The clinician then sang the melody using the words of a target phrase or sentence. The patient then sang along with the clinician, and the latter gradually stopped participating to let the patient complete the phrase alone. The patient then repeated the phrase. Finally a normal intonation contour was substituted for the melody, and all the procedures were repeated with the normal intonation. In the Draizar study, the experimental group used narrative contexts for the sentences used in the Melodic Intonation Therapy, whereas the Control group used arbitrary sentences. Draizar compared the two groups, consisting of nine aphasics with left frontal and/or temporal-lobe lesions, before and after 15 weeks of therapy along the lines just described, with respect to seven categories relevant to Givón’s pragmatic-syntantactic mode distinction:

1. Quantity of verbalization (less [pragmatic] vs. more [syntactic]).

2. Word order (topic-comment [pragmatic] vs. subject-predicate [syntactic]).

3. Syntactic complexity (conjunction [pragmatic] vs. subordination [syntactic]).

4. Noun to verb ratio (N ≤ V [pragmatic] vs. N > V [syntactic]).

5. Use of grammatical morphemes (used in syntactic mode only).

6. Use of anaphora (greater in syntactic mode).

7. Intonation pattern (more cohesive with increased syntacticization).

The results of the study tended to support Givón’s approach to language change as applied to linguistic evolution of aphasics. The categories of word order, syntactic complexity, and noun-to-verb ratio were found to increase significantly over the 15-week period (ANOVA, p = .03, .005, .025, respectively). Furthermore, the use of the narrative (i.e., pragmatic) context in the experimental group yielded increases significantly greater than those for the control group for the categories of syntactic complexity (p = .012) and use of anaphora (p = .021).

The present investigation differs profoundly from Draizar’s in that it was not originally intended to examine Givón’s continuum. Indeed, it was conceived more than a year before the publication of Givón’s work. Thus the analyses of the test items in such terms have been post hoc, and the investigation reported and discussed herein may be best thought of as an extended pilot study, which offers sufficient food for thought to warrant future studies of Givón’s approach to language evolution as applied to aphasic linguistic dissolution.

The investigation reported herein was originally intended to study the effects of various personal and neuropathological characteristics of bilingual aphasics on their linguistic and metalinguistic behavior, and the author began the study with a strict localizationist bias (Schnitzer, 1978a, 1982, 1986). But as will become obvious, the interpretation of the data as indicative of regression along Givón’s continuum is quite persuasive. And although such analysis by no means obviates the need for close correlation of lesion site with psychological symptom, and in no sense makes a claim for overall equipotentiality, nonetheless, the data strongly support a vertical (i.e., hierarchical) approach as complementary to a horizontal (i.e., localizationist) one.³

Certain of the functions of the syntactic mode can be seen to be more automatic, less “computational” than others. These low-level phenomena (such as certain kinds of agreement, concord, and other morphological manifestations of syntactic redundancy) are acquired early and tend to be resistant to linguistic dissolution.⁴ In chapter 6 (“Interpretation”), it is argued that in the tests taken by the aphasics in this study, significant differences in performance on items with differing linguistic characteristics can be traced either to:

1. The fact that a pragmatic-mode strategy is being employed in a task requiring syntactic-mode processing.

2. The fact that certain items can be dealt with successfully by means of pragmatic-mode processing, whereas other cannot.

3. The fact that certain low-level syntactic-mode phenomena are over-learned, automatic, and resistant to dissolution. (See footnote ⁴.)

It should be noted at the outset that the word “pragmatic” is used throughout this work in a systematically ambiguous manner. “Pragmatic” in the sense of Givón’s communicative continuum refers to a cardinal point specified by the characteristics mentioned previously, at which speakers behave with relative insensitivity to the purely morphosyntactic properties of language. But this insensitivity to properties of the syntactic mode will entail a comparative enhancement of sensitivity to pragmatic factors in a more general sense of the term, including, for example, general knowledge of the world, Grice’s maxims (Grice, 1975), awareness of the communicative setting and participants. Hence, linguistic performance by aphasics that shows greater sensitivity to pragmatic elements in this more general sense (in comparison to demonstrated insensitivity for morphosyntactic elements) will be considered as evidence of regression in the direction of the pragmatic mode.

A caveat is in order here, I believe, concerning the use of the word “regression” in this book. First, it is nowhere implied nor do I wish to imply that aphasic language regresses to an earlier stage of linguistic ontogeny. There is ample evidence in the literature that it does not (e.g., Caramazza & Zurif, 1978; Dennis & Wiegel-Crump, 1979). My aim is emphatically not to resurrect a Jakobsonian regression hypothesis (e.g., Jakobson, 1968). What I do wish to suggest is that aphasic language represents a regression along the Givonian communicative continuum, a regression to a more primitive form not to an earlier stage. In the words of Brown (1980, p. 299), the regression is “microstructural, not ontogenetic. Pathological symptoms refer to levels in cognition, not stages in cognitive development.” Aphasics tend to function at a level more characteristic of the pragmatic mode than do normal speakers. Although this mode is found in certain stages of child language, certain kinds of pidgins, etc. (see Chapter 7), this fact does not entail that aphasic speech should closely resemble children’s speech or pidgins.

Second, it is important to emphasize that appropriate use of the pragmatic mode is not an indicator of a more primitive system of communication. On the contrary, the fact that many important aspects of communication must be analyzed in terms of discourse pragmatics may indicate that these aspects are in fact too complex to be syntacticized: That is why they remain as discourse phenomena. It is only when pragmatic processes are used instead of syntactic processes because the speaker lacks (adequate control of) the appropriate syntactic processes, that one can speak of the use of a more primitive system. Thus, in this book it is argued that in aphasia, pragmatic-mode strategies tend to be used for tasks that in normals have become syntacticized. Hence, aphasics tend to fail on tasks tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• 1 INTRODUCTION
• 2 INSTRUMENT
• 3 PROCEDURES
• 4 SUBJECTS
• 5 RESULTS
• 6 DISCUSSION
• 7 RELEVANCE TO RELATED FIELDS
• AFTERWORD
• REFERENCES
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX