Sentence production ability of a bilingual Cantonese/English agrammatic speaker

Abstract

The majority of studies on grammatical disruption in aphasia have focused on European languages. Theories developed from the observations made with these monolingual studies are often limited by the specific characteristic of the language under investigation. Therefore, recent aphasiology research has attempted to look at cross-language comparisons. This study reports the sentence production ability of a bilingual agrammatic subject who was fluent in Cantonese and English. Although the severity of aphasia was similar in both languages according to standardized aphasia tests, a linguistic analysis showed that the pattern of disruption was not the same. The ability to construct sentences at the clause level and the use of morphological structures were relatively more disrupted in Cantonese. These findings highlight the importance of the effect of the Cantonese syntactic characteristics on agrammatism, and support the concept of separate mental lexicons for different types of closed-class elements.