SYNTACTIC COMPETENCE IN SPEECH DISORDERS – A NEUROSYNTACTIC PERSPECTIVE
Journal Title: Acta Neuropsychologica - Year 2015, Vol 13, Issue 1
Abstract
Background: The article presents the research on syntactic competence from the perspective of neurosyntactics. One of the research aims was to show the differences in linguistic functioning between people with underdeveloped perceptual skills (oligophasia) – with damaged/underdeveloped neural modules responsible for syntax – and people with underdeveloped articulatory skills (dysarthria), without the abovementioned neural damage.Material/Methods: In order to obtain the normative syntactic structures, 180 children with unimpeded speech were studied first, aged 4-9. The main part of the research examined 15 patients with oligophasia and 15 patients with cerebral palsy dysarthria. The methods of the research involved the presentation of some newly-coined verbs to the study subject and the assessment of how well they managed to use them within a set of syntactic structures.Results: The children with intellectual disabilities (oligophasia) showed a lower level of syntactic competence – 35.65% of their sentences were correct. The patients with dysarthria managed to produce successfully 62.95% of their sentences. The syntactic competence in statistically 13.6-year-old patients with dysarthria is equal to the syntactic competence of 7-year-old children without any speech disorders. In the case of oligophasia, the results are relatively worse. The statistical 13.9-year-old patient with intellectual disability performed the tasks at a level which was lower than an average 6-year-old with unimpeded speech. Conclusions: Syntactic competence is largely dependent on the structure of the cerebral cortex, in which the neural networks responsible for linguistic competence are situated. Therefore, the acquisition of language cannot be seen as a matter of social and cultural interaction only. It is a form of subconscious knowledge, mainly biologically- and neurally-conditioned, which allows for the proper production of the syntactic structures.
Authors and Affiliations
Mirosław Michalik
Keywords
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