Cross-linguistic differences in a picture-description task between korean-and english-speaking individuals with aphasia

Jee Eun Sung, Gayle DeDe, Soo Eun Lee

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine crosslinguistic differences in a picture-description task between Korean-and English-speaking individuals with Broca’s and anomic aphasia to determine whether a variation exists in the use of verbs and nouns across the language and aphasia groups. Method: Forty-eight individuals (male = 29; female = 19) participated in the study (n = 28 for aphasic group and n = 20 healthy controls). Data for English speakers were obtained from the Aphasia Bank Project. We used the picturedescription task to obtain connected speech samples and analyzed noun-and verb-related linguistic variables. Results: Korean speakers with aphasia produced more verbs per utterance and a lower noun-to-verb ratio than English speakers with aphasia, whereas English speakers produced more nouns than Korean speakers. The Korean anomic group produced more verbs than Korean speakers with Broca’s aphasia, whereas no effects were significant for English speakers with aphasia depending on the type of aphasia. Conclusions: Aphasia symptoms vary as a function of linguistic features of languages that individuals with aphasia used premorbidly. Furthermore, the linguistic characteristics of the individual’s language influenced aphasia symptoms more strongly than the type of aphasia. It is theoretically and clinically important that this cross-linguistic study provides different perspectives, and that noun–verb deficits may vary depending on linguistic features.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)S813-S822
JournalAmerican Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
Volume25
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

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