Quantifier Spreading in Patients with Expressive-Agrammatic and Receptive Aphasia

Abstract

Quantifier spreading is a phenomenon demonstrated by preschool children, defined as the difficulty in universal quantifier comprehension in contexts where there is an extra object in comparison with the number of subjects performing an action. Previous research has shown that patients with expressive-agrammatic aphasia exhibit the same comprehension errors with universally quantified utterances that were previously found in preschool children. These studies were only focused on English patients with expressive-agrammatic aphasia. The aim of this study was to find out if stable Spanish patients with receptive aphasia or expressive-agrammatic aphasia demonstrated more spreading errors than their age-matched non-brain damaged adults. Moreover, we wanted to find out that non-brain damage adults did not demonstrate quantifier spreading. The study involved six fluent-receptive aphasia patients, six non-fluent expressive-agrammatic aphasia patients, and nine age-matched non-brain damaged adults who were tested with a Picture Verification Task. The participants were asked to judge a sentence, which was composed of a transitive verb and the universal quantifier every like [Every NP V NP], as ‘true’ or ‘false’ according to the picture. Patients with receptive aphasia did not show a significant difference in comparison with non-brain damage adults. However, patients with non-fluent expressive-agrammatic aphasia did reveal marginally significant differences in comparison with non-brain damage adults. We reasoned that expressive-agrammatic aphasia patients also demonstrate quantifier spreading as preschool children do, due to limited processing resources. However, the errors that expressive-agrammatic aphasia patients exhibited were not consistent. Thus, we proposed that a larger sample should be taken in a longitudinal study in order to find out if patients with aphasia show the phenomenon of quantifier spreading and if a possible recovery or progression takes place during a long period of treatment. Moreover, we suggested that a different methodology should be used in order to accomplish more complete interpretation of aphasia patients’ knowledge of language related to the universal quantifiers. In summary, further research should be done to gain a better understanding of brain language with an emphasis on the linguistic theory of universal quantifier comprehension.