ABSTRACT Background Within the last four decades, individuals with aphasia have been observed to face difficulties in understanding complex sentences despite having good understanding of single words. The difficulties observed have been proposed to follow a pattern predicted by the theory of grammar, making the deficit a special case of an underspecified language competence. Aims The purpose of this study is to examine sentence types – reversible actives and passives and argument complexity among Malay speakers with aphasia, looking at sources of difficulties with non-canonical sentences in a language with free word order. Methods & Procedures A group of five non-brain-damaged (NBD) adults and five adults with aphasia matched with age, education, and language were recruited. Subjects were tested in their sentence comprehension abilities via two picture matching tasks: a reversibility active/passive and an argument complexity task based on the number of arguments. Outcomes & Results Generally, the control adults had better sentence comprehension than the group of adults with aphasia, with significant differences in the mean scores of both active and passive reversible sentences. The analysis of the argument complexity task showed that the comprehension level in adults with aphasia was preserved although lower compared to their normal counterparts. Finally, an error analysis of the responses showed that individuals with aphasia had different sources of difficulties: with thematic roles in passive sentences based on syntactic similarities and with active sentences based on semantic similarities. Conclusions Individuals with aphasia, speakers of a free word order language demonstrated lower understanding of both reversible active and passive sentences with no apparent signs of canonicity patterns. A more detailed error analysis disentangled the source of difficulties with reversible errors for passives based on grammatical order and semantic-based errors for agent-driven sentences based on semantic preferences.

中文翻译：

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成年马来语失语者的句法能力：被动句和论点结构的研究

摘要背景在过去的四年中，尽管对单个单词有很好的理解，但已经观察到失语症患者在理解复杂句子方面遇到困难。已提出观察到的困难遵循语法理论预测的模式，使缺陷成为未指定语言能力的特例。目的 本研究的目的是检查句子类型——可逆的主动句和被动句以及有失语症的马来人的论点复杂性，研究在具有自由词序的语言中使用非规范句子的困难来源。方法和程序 招募了一组 5 名非脑损伤 (NBD) 成人和 5 名年龄、教育程度和语言相匹配的失语症成人。通过两个图片匹配任务测试受试者的句子理解能力：可逆性主动/被动和基于参数数量的参数复杂性任务。结果与结果 总体而言，对照组成人的句子理解能力优于失语组成人，在主动和被动可逆句子的平均得分上存在显着差异。对论证复杂性任务的分析表明，失语症成人的理解水平虽然低于正常人，但仍保持不变。最后，对回答的错误分析表明，失语症个体有不同的困难来源：基于句法相似性的被动句中的主题角色和基于语义相似性的主动句中的主题角色。结论 患有失语症的个体，使用自由词序语言的人表现出对可逆主动句和被动句的理解较低，没有明显的规范模式迹象。更详细的错误分析解决了基于语法顺序的被动句的可逆错误和基于语义偏好的代理驱动句子的基于语义的错误的困难根源。