Comprehension of Complex Structures by Persian-speaking Aphasics: The Role of Cognitive Load

Abstract

Introduction: So far, many studies have investigated the extent and nature of the grammatical deficit in aphasia. However, to the best of our knowledge, this research is the first in the Persian language to inspect the comprehension of patients with Broca’s aphasia on diverse syntactically complex structures.

Materials and Methods: To scrutinize the impact of task on aphasics’ performance, four age-, education- and gender-matched Persian-speaking patients with Broca’s aphasia were compared with their healthy matched controls regarding the two different tasks of grammatical judgment and figurine act-out task. The structures used to examine the subjects’ performance included agentive passive, subject cleft, object cleft, object relative clause, and object experiencer psychological verbs.

Results: Our results which supported the trade-off hypothesis, showed that our subjects generally performed better in grammatical judgment task than in figurine act-out task (P≤0.05). Particularly in the second task, as our inner task comparison, the patients’ problems were more severe in object cleft, object experiencer, and object relative clauses: all structures whose interpretations need more cognitive load.

Conclusion: Our findings put more weight on the interactive or constraint-based model of language processing.