Agrammatic production: A cross-linguistic comparison of English and Cantonese

Abstract

Chinese is a language with little inflectional morphology. It is also characterized by the frequent use of elliptical sentences because of its usual omission of topic and grammatical subjects in sentences. It has been suggested that these characteristics may obscure the distinction between normal and agrammatic speech. Nevertheless, the findings from the present study show that agrammatism in Cantonese (a dialect of Chinese) can be clearly identified from non-aphasic language. Indeed, the disruption patterns of morphological and syntactic structures found in five Cantonese-speaking agrammatic subjects were comparable to those demonstrated by a group of matched English-speaking agrammatic subjects. Although the Cantonese agrammatic subjects demonstrated a frequent use of elliptical sentences, they still demonstrated relatively intact ability to choose the structure to form the topic of a sentence. Such an observation was interpreted as an effort of adaptation to compensate for the difficulty in formulating long and complex sentences.