5dez 2022
06:30 UTC
#linguistweets
#abralin

Reflexive anaphors in Turkish aphasia

Aphasia is an acquired language impairment. People with aphasia (PWA) are often impaired in processing pronouns (i.e. he/she). Unlike many languages, Turkish has two types of reflexives: kendi and kendisi (both ‘oneself’), which show a flexible binding relationship referring to local and non-local referents. In this study, a group of Turkish speaking PWA and a control group were recruited for an eye-movement monitoring experiment. The participants listened to a set of sentences with kendi and kendisi in local and non-local conditions while they gazed at visually depicted portrays of potential referents. The results have shown that the PWA strongly considered non-local referents for both the reflexive conditions while controls preferred a local reading for kendi but not for kendisi. For kendi reflexives, PWA’ s target fixations to both local and non-local referents were reduced as compared to the controls. For kendisi reflexives, however, controls fixated on the non-local referents more often than PWA. It seems as though locality constraints on Turkish reflexive anaphors are loosely applied in aphasic sentence comprehension.