EXPLORING SYNTACTIC PROCESSING IN URDU SPEAKING BROCA’S APHASICS

Abstract

Broca’s aphasia is a kind of language disorder that results from damage to the posterior part of the frontal lobe of the brain. Aphasics largely retain their language comprehension abilities, however, they struggle with the production of speech. It is a consequence of the brain's weaker control over the muscles that produce language. The spoken expressions of aphasics vary from single to four words or so due to this difficulty in pronouncing the words. A deficit in syntactic structure is the natural outcome of this situation. It has been found about the English speaking aphasics that their expressions are very short, mostly consisting of content words. Occasionally an alteration in the semantic roles has also been noted. However, none of the studies has discussed the behaviour of Urdu speaking aphasics so far. An analysis of their expressions can contribute to the understanding of this aphasia in general. Speech samples and short histories of 5 aphasics have been examined for this study. It has been found that although their expressions do not follow any specific order, and vary from person to person, however, some universal attention  grabbers have been found prominent in these expressions. Secondly, they put extra effort while telling about the objects that they personally liked. These findings can be helpful in understanding the nature and implications of Broca’s aphasia in general.

Key words: Broca’s aphasia, syntactic structure, Urdu, content words, function words.