Corrective Repetition of Ungrammatical Gender Agreement Stimuli: A Transcortical Sensory Aphasia Single Case Study

• Published in: Aphasiology Vol. 37; no. 4; pp. 599 - 612
• Main Authors: Dentella, Vittoria, Bertocci, Davide, Semenza, Carlo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 03.04.2023; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Animacy; Aphasia; Case studies; Comprehension; Gender; Gender agreement; Gender morphology; Grammatical agreement; Grammatical gender; Information processing; Italian language; Linguistics; Morphology; Nouns; oral repetition; Reference (Semantic); Repetition; Semantics; Syntactic processing; Transcortical sensory aphasia
• DOI: 10.1080/02687038.2022.2033160
• ISSN: 0268-7038

Oral repetition in Transcortical Sensory Aphasia (TSA) has been shown to display linguistically informed altering of purposefully grammatically incorrect repetition stimuli, with a tendency to correct grammatical errors during repetition in spite of the absence of semantic comprehension. The present TSA single-case study, conducted in Italian, investigated the processing of linguistic Gender agreement errors through a series of oral repetition tasks, with the purpose of (i) investigating whether grammatical and semantic Gender can be independently spared; and (ii) investigating whether Gender agreement errors are informative among the linguistic facts that the patient retains sensitivity towards, and if so, how. TST, a native speaker of Italian diagnosed with TSA, was administered 8 oral repetition tasks, each containing Gender agreement errors that occurred either in phrase condition (i.e., "definite article + noun"), or in sentence condition (i.e., "subject + nominal predicate"). These different conditions were formulated with the purpose of appreciating possible differences in the processing of the Gender feature in two different syntactic environments. A number of additional variables was introduced: singular/plural; feminine/masculine; Gender morphological (un)informativeness; common noun/proper name status; animate/inanimate noun referents. During repetition, the changes applied by the patient were almost exclusively corrective and mostly followed a left-to-right strategy. Among the introduced variables, those that gave significant effects were as follows: animate/inanimate noun referents and phrase/sentence agreement. Gender morphological (un)informativeness gave no significant effects, and neither did common noun/proper name status, singular/plural and feminine/masculine nouns. Implications for linguistic theory in terms of the Gender/Class pairing are discussed. Findings indicate that (i) grammatical and semantic Gender can be independently spared; and (ii) in Italian, Gender is morphologically realized and could consequently be accessed for the purposes of agreement only in the case of nouns of the animate kind: Gender of animate nouns elicited corrective changes, while Gender of inanimate nouns was utterly ignored.