engleski

Referential choice in the narrative discourse of people with aphasia

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder resulting from damage to the language centers in the brain (ASHA, 2020). Narrative discourse analysis provides a better understanding of the language abilities of people with aphasia. One way to achieve discourse cohesion is through the use of appropriate reference devices to indicate that a piece of information is new (generally indefinite forms, e.g., boy), is given (pronoun), or is assumed (definite forms, e.g., Peter) (Givón, 1989). These pragmatic categories are universal, but the referential devices can vary across languages. The successful use of referential devices depends on linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, including cognitive demands that increase with the number of characters in the story and the gender of the characters (Hendriks et al., 2014). The aim of this study was to investigate reference in the discourse of people with aphasia (PwA) and typical speakers (TS) through the introduction, maintenance, and reintroduction of characters in situations with different cognitive demands (characters of the same gender vs.characters of different gender). Narrative samples of PwA (n = 17) and TS (n = 17) were retrieved from the Croatian discourse corpus of speakers with aphasia (Kuvač Kraljević et al., 2017). The proportions of pronouns and nouns (both in the grammatical role of subject) were calculated for each participant. A 2 x 2 mixed design ANOVA was conducted to test the main effects and interaction of group (PwA vs. TS) and situation (same gender vs. different gender). We found no main effects of group and situation in introduction. In maintenance, there was a main effect of situation (F(1, 32) = 5.993, p < .05). The proportions of pronouns in both groups were significantly higher in situations with characters of different gender, while the proportions of nouns were significantly higher in situations with characters of the same gender. In reintroduction, we found a main effect of group (F(1, 32) = 4.784, p < .05), and the interaction of group and situation was also significant (F(1, 32) = 4.157, p = .05). PwA produced significantly more pronouns compared to TS and the difference was significant in situations with characters of the same gender. There was also a main effect of group (F(1, 32) = 4.621, p < .05) on the proportion of nouns and the interaction between group and situation (F(1, 32) = .364, p = .550). TS produced significantly more nouns than PwA. The descriptive statistics is available in Table 1. In cognitively demanding situations, when characters of the same gender need to be reintroduced with nouns, PwA produced a greater number of pronouns than TS, leading to ambiguity and redundancy. Our findings are consistent with studies showing that PwA are prone to erroneous and repetitive referencing patterns, such as the overuse of pronouns (see Arslan et al., 2021 ; Martinez- Ferreiro et al., 2019 ; Zhang et al., 2020). To conclude, the present study contributes to the limited knowledge on reference in the discourse of PwA, especially in Croatian, by revealing in which functions and/or situations PwA show the greatest differences compared to TS.

Aphasia ; Narrative discourse ; Referential devices ; Referential function

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