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Whorf published several articles on Hopi grammar, focusing particularly on the ways in which the grammatical categories of Hopi encoded information about events and processes, and how this correlated with aspects of Hopi culture and behavior. After his death his full sketch of Hopi grammar was published by his friend the linguist Harry Hoijer, and some essays on Native American linguistics, many of which had been previously published in academic journals, were published in 1956 in the anthology "Language, Thought, and Reality" by his friend psychologist John Bissell Carroll.
Whorf's most frequently cited statement regarding Hopi time is the strongly worded introduction of his 1936 paper "An American Indian model of the Universe", which was first published posthumously in Carroll's edited volume. Here he writes that
Whorf argues that in Hopi units of time are not represented by nouns, but by adverbs or verbs. Whorf argues that all Hopi nouns include the notion of a boundary or outline, and that consequently the Hopi language does not refer to abstract concepts with nouns. This, Whorf argues, is encoded in Hopi grammar, which does not allow durations of time to be counted in the same way objects are. So instead of saying, for example, "three days", Hopi would say the equivalent of "on the third day", using ordinal numbers. Whorf argues that the Hopi do not consider the process of time passing to produce another new day, but merely as bringing back the daylight aspect of the world.
Whorf gives slightly different analyses of the grammatical encoding of time in Hopi in his different writings. His first published writing on Hopi grammar was the paper "The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi", published in 1936 in "Language", the journal of the Linguistic Society of America. Here Whorf analyzed Hopi as having a tense system with a distinction between three tenses: one used for past or present events (which Whorf calls the "Factual" tense or "present-past"); one for future events; and one for events that are generally or universally true (here called "usitative"). This analysis was repeated in a 1937 letter to J. B. Carroll, who later published it as part of his selected writings under the title "Discussion of Hopi Linguistics".
In the 1940 article "Science and Linguistics", Whorf gave the same three-way classification based on the speaker's assertion of the validity of his statement: "The timeless Hopi verb does not distinguish between the present, past and future of the event itself but must always indicate what type of validity the intends the statement to have: a. report of an event .. b. expectation of an event ..; generalization or law about events."
In his interpretation of Hopi time Whorf was influenced by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, which was developed in the first decades of the century and impacted the general Zeitgeist. Whorf, an engineer by profession, in fact made occasional reference to physical relativity, and he adopted the term "linguistic relativity," reflecting the general concept of the different but equally valid interpretations of some aspects of physical reality by different observers due to differences in their (for Einstein) physical circumstances or (for Whorf) their psychological-linguistic circumstances.
The most salient points involve the concepts of "simultaneity" and "spacetime". In his 1905 Special Relativity paper, Einstein maintained that two given events can legitimately be called simultaneous if and only if they take place at the same point in time and in the same point in space. No two events which take place at a spatial distance from one another can legitimately be declared to be simultaneous in any absolute sense, for the judgement of simultaneity or non-simultaneity will depend on the physical circumstances (to be exact: the relative motion) of the observers. This difference is no artifact; each of the observers is correct (and is wrong only to the extent he or she insists that another observer is incorrect).
Hermann Minkowski, in his seminal 1908 address to the Congress of German Physicists, translated Einstein's 1905 mathematical equations into geometric terms. Minkowski famously declared:
"Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality."
Spatial distance and temporal distance between any two events was now replaced by a single absolute distance in spacetime.
Heynick points to several passages in Whorf's writings on the Hopis which parallel Einsteinian concepts such as:
"time varies with each observer and does not permit of simultaneity" (1940)
"The Hopi metaphysics does not raise the question whether the things at a distant village exist at the same moment as those in one's own village, for it ... says that any 'events' in the distant village can be compared to any events in one's own village only by an interval of magnitude that has both time and space forms in it." (c.1936)
The concept of a "simultaneous now" throughout the cosmos was formulated by Aristotle, Newton, and most succinctly in John Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1690):
"For this moment is common to all things that are now in being ... they all exist in the same moment of time."
Whorf saw this notion as derived from the Standard Average European languages in which these thinkers thought: "Newtonian space, time, and matter are no intuitions. They are recepts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them."
Heynick, who claimed no personal knowledge of the Hopi language, posits alternative weaker and stronger interpretations of the influence of Einsteinian relativity on Whorf's analysis of the Hopi language and the Hopi concept of time. In the weaker version, the (then) new questioning of the nature of time and space brought about by the Einsteinian revolution in physics enabled Whorf to approach the Hopis and their language unburdened by traditional Western concepts and presumptions. The stronger version is that Whorf under the influence of Einstein tended inadvertently to "read into" his linguistic and cultural data relativistic concepts where they perhaps were not.
In 1964 John Greenway published a humorous portrait of American culture, "The Inevitable Americans", in which he wrote: "You have a watch, because Americans are obsessed with time. If you were a Hopi Indian, you would have none, the Hopi have no concept of time". And even the 1971 ethnography of the Hopi by Euler and Dobyns claimed that "The English concept of time is nearly incomprehensible to the Hopi". The myth quickly became a staple element of New Age conceptualizations of the Hopi.
In 1959 philosopher Max Black published a critique of Whorf's arguments in which he argued that the principle of linguistic relativity was obviously wrong because translation between languages is always possible, even when there are no exact correspondences between the single words or concepts in the two languages.
Most of "Hopi Time" is dedicated to the detailed description of the Hopi usage of words and constructions related to time. Malotki describes in detail the usage of a large amount of linguistic material: temporal adverbs, time units, time counting practices such as the Hopi calendar, the way that days are counted and time is measured.
Linguists and psychologists who work in the universalist tradition such as Steven Pinker and John McWhorter, have seen Malotki's study as being the final proof that Whorf was an inept linguist and had no significant knowledge or understanding of the Hopi language. This interpretation has been criticized by relativist scholars as unfounded and based on a lack of knowledge of Whorf's work.
In spite of Malotki's refutation, the myth that "the Hopi have no concept of time" lived on in the popular literature. For example, in her 1989 novel "Sexing the Cherry", Jeanette Winterson wrote of the Hopi: "...their language has no grammar in the way we recognize it. And most bizarre of all, they have no tenses for past, present and future. They do not sense time in that way. For them time is one." And the myth continues to be an integral part of New Age thinking that draws on stereotypical depictions of "timeless Hopi culture".
Some linguists working on Universals of semantics, such as Anna Wierzbicka and Cliff Goddard, argue that there is a Natural Semantic Metalanguage that has a basic vocabulary of semantic "primes" including concepts such as . They have argued that Malotki's data show that the Hopi share these primes with English and all other languages, even though it is also clear that the precise way in which these concepts fit into the larger pattern of culture and language practices is different in each language, as illustrated by the differences between Hopi and English.
Historian of science, G E R Lloyd held that Malotki's investigation "made it abundantly clear that the Hopi had, and have, no difficulty whatsoever in drawing distinctions between past, present, and future. Some investigators of Puebloan astronomical knowledge have taken a compromise position, noting that while Malotki's study of Hopi temporal concepts and timekeeping practices "has clearly refuted Whorf's assertion that Hopi is a 'timeless' language, and in doing so has destroyed Whorf's strongest example for linguistic relativity, he presents no naively positivist assertion of the total independence of language and thought."
In a book review of Hopi Time, Leanne Hinton echoes Lucy's observation that Malotki wrongly characterizes Whorf's claim that Hopi have no concept of time or cannot express time. She further claims that Malotki's glosses of Hopi often use English terms for time that do not exactly translate time terms (e.g., translating "three-repetitions" in Hopi as "three times"), thereby "mak[ing] the error of attributing temporality to any Hopi sentence that translates into English with a temporal term". Further, without delineating "Hopi views of time from the views expressed by English translations" "What is meant by the word 'time', and what are the criteria for determining whether or not a concept is "temporal" is never answered by Malotki, thus begging the question.
In 1991 Penny Lee published a comparison of Malotki and Whorf's analyses of the adverbial word class that Whorf had called "tensors". She argues that Whorf's analysis captured aspects of Hopi grammar that were not captured by simply describing tensors as falling within the class of temporal adverbs.
In 2006 anthropologist David Dinwoodie published a severe critique of Malotki's work, questioning his methods and his presentation of data as well as his analysis. Dinwoodie argues that Malotki fails to adequately support his claim of having demonstrated that the Hopi have a concept of time "as we know it". He provides ethnographic examples of how some Hopi speakers explain the way they experience the difference between a traditional Hopi way of experiencing time as tied closely to cycles of ritual and natural events, and the Anglo-American concept of clock-time or school-time.
Looked at from the perspective of the History of Science, Hopi conceptions of time and space, which underlie their well-developed observational solar calendar, raise the question of how to translate Hopi conceptions into terms intelligible to Western ears.
A reduced relative clause is a relative clause that is "not" marked by an explicit relative pronoun or complementizer such as "who", "which" or "that". An example is the clause "I saw" in the English sentence "This is the man "I saw"." Unreduced forms of this relative clause would be "This is the man "that I saw"." or "..."whom I saw"."
Another form of reduced relative clause is the "reduced object passive relative clause", a type of nonfinite clause headed by a past participle, such as the clause "found here" in: "The animals "found here" can be dangerous."
Reduced relative clauses are given to ambiguity or garden path effects, and have been a common topic of psycholinguistic study, especially in the field of sentence processing.
Regular relative clauses are a class of dependent clause (or "subordinate clause") that usually modifies a noun. They are typically introduced by one of the relative pronouns "who", "whom", "whose", "what", or "which"and, in English, by the word "that", which may be analyzed either as a relative pronoun or as a relativizer (complementizer); see That a relativizer.
Reduced relative clauses have no such relative pronoun or complementizer introducing them. The example below contrasts an English non-reduced relative clause and reduced relative clause.
Because of the omission of function words, the use of reduced relative clauses, particularly when nested, can give rise to sentences which, while theoretically correct grammatically, are not readily parsed by listeners. A well-known example put forward by linguists is "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo", which contains the reduced relative clause "Buffalo buffalo buffalo" (meaning "which buffalo from Buffalo (do) buffalo").
While reduced relative clauses are not the only structures that create garden path sentences in English (other forms of garden path sentences include those caused by lexical ambiguity, or words that can have more than one meaning), they are the "classic" example of garden path sentences, and have been the subject of the most research.
Not all grammatical frameworks include reduced relative clauses. The term reduced relative clause comes from transformational generative grammar, which assumes deep structures and surface structures in language. Frameworks that assume no underlying form label non-finite reduced relative clauses as participial phrases.
In languages with head-final relative clauses, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish, non-reduced relative clauses may also cause temporary ambiguity because the complementizer does not precede the relative clause (and thus a person reading or hearing the relative clause has no "warning" that they are in a relative clause).
In psycholinguistics, a lemma (plural "lemmas" or "lemmata") is an abstract conceptual form of a word that has been mentally selected for utterance in the early stages of speech production. A lemma represents a specific meaning but does not have any specific sounds that are attached to it.
This two-staged model is the most widely supported theory of speech production in psycholinguistics, although it has been challenged. For example, there is some evidence to indicate that the grammatical gender of a noun is retrieved from the word's phonological form (the lexeme) rather than from the lemma. This can be explained by models that do not assume a distinct level between the semantic and the phonological stages (and so lack a lemma representation).
During the process of language activation, lemma retrieval is the first step in lexical access. In this step, meaning and the syntactic elements of a lexical item are realized as the lemma. Lemma retrieval, as explained through a spreading-activation theory, is part of a network of separate elements consisting of the abstract concept, the lemma and the lexeme. Lemma retrieval is aided by the activation level of the concept that has yet to be verbalized. When activation takes place on the lemma level, the highest activated lemma element is selected.
Lexical selection experiments have provided evidence that lemma retrieval is affected by the frequency of the word. This indicates that word frequency not only has an effect on the phonological elements of a word but also the semantic and syntactic elements that make of the lemma.
Experiments that have studied the Tip-of-the tongue (TOT) phenomenon have provided evidence that less strong connections of phonological elements (lexemes) and lexical and syntactic representation (lemmas) lead to inability to retrieve a lexical item. TOT utterances provide evidence that the lemmas and lexemes are separate processes in language activation.
The concept of lemma is similar to the Sanskrit "sphoṭa" (6th century), an invariant mental word, to which the sound is intimately – but not indivisibly – connected.
Maledictology (from Latin "maledicere", "to say [something] ("dicere") bad ("male")" and Greek "logia", "study of") is a branch of psychology that does research into cursing and swearing. It is influenced by American psychologist Timothy Jay (Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts) and the philologist and researcher in swearwords Reinhold Aman (California). They assume that swearing is part of human life and can even act as a passive self-defense, since it prevents palpable argument.
Dieter Gilberto Hillert () is a German-American biolinguist and cognitive scientist. His research focuses on the human language faculty as a cognitive and neurological system. He is known for work on the neurobiology of language, real-time sentence processing, and language evolution. He advocates comparative evolutionary studies of cognition, argues against tablua rasa models, and favors computational theories of mind.
He received several awards from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
The early left anterior negativity (commonly referred to as ELAN) is an event-related potential in electroencephalography (EEG), or component of brain activity that occurs in response to a certain kind of stimulus. It is characterized by a negative-going wave that peaks around 200 milliseconds or less after the onset of a stimulus, and most often occurs in response to linguistic stimuli that violate word-category or phrase structure rules (as in *"the in room" instead of "in the room"). As such, it is frequently a topic of study in neurolinguistics experiments, specifically in areas such as sentence processing. While it is frequently used in language research, there is no evidence yet that it is necessarily a language-specific phenomenon.
More recent work has criticized the design of many of the foundational studies that characterized the ELAN, such that apparent ELAN effects might be the result of spillover from words prior to the onset of the critical word. This raises important questions about whether the ELAN is a true ERP component or an artifact of certain experimental designs.
The ELAN was first reported by Angela D. Friederici as a response to German sentences with phrase structure violations, such as *"the pizza was in the eaten" (as opposed to "the pizza was eaten"); it can be elicited by English phrase structure violations such as *"Max's of proof" (as opposed to "Max's proof") or *"your write" (as opposed to "you write"). The ELAN is not elicited by sentences with other kinds of grammatical errors, such as subject-verb disagreement (*""he go to the store" rather than "he goes to the store"") or grammatically dispreferred and "awkward" sentences (such as ""the doctor charged the patient was lying" rather than "the doctor charged that the patient was lying""); it only appears when it is impossible to build local phrase structure.
It appears rapidly, peaking between 100 and 300 milliseconds after the onset of the grammatically incorrect stimulus (other reports have placed its time course, or "latency", between 100 and 200ms, "under 200ms", "around 125 ms", or "about 160ms"). The speed of the ELAN may also be affected by characteristic of the violating stimuli; the ELAN appears later to visual stimuli that are fuzzy or difficult to see, and may occur earlier in morphologically complex spoken words where much information about the meaning of the word precedes the word's recognition point.
Its name derives from the fact that it is picked up most robustly by EEG sensors on the left front regions of the scalp; it may sometimes, however, have a bilateral (both sides of the scalp) distribution.
Some authors consider the ELAN to be a separate response from the left anterior negativity (LAN), while others label it as just an early version of the LAN.
The ELAN has been reported in languages such as English, German, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese. It is possible, though, that it is not a response specific to language (in other words, that the ELAN might also occur in response to non-linguistic stimuli).
Bilingual interactive activation plus (BIA+) is a model for understanding the process of bilingual language comprehension and consists of two interactive subsystems: the word identification subsystem and task/decision subsystem. It is the successor of the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model which was updated in 2002 to include phonologic and semantic lexical representations, revise the role of language nodes, and specify the purely bottom-up nature of bilingual language processing.
The BIA+ is one of many models that was defined based on data from psycholinguistic or behavioral studies which investigate how the languages of bilinguals are manipulated during listening, reading and speaking each of them; however, BIA+ is now being supported by neuroimaging data linking this model to more neurally inspired ones which have a greater focus on the brain areas and mechanisms involved in these tasks.
The two basic tools in these studies are the event-related potential (ERP) which has high temporal resolution but low spatial resolution and the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which typically has high spatial resolution and low temporal resolution. When used together, however, these two methods can generate a more complete picture of the time course and interactivity of bilingual language processing according to the BIA+ model. These methods, however, do need to be considered carefully as overlapping activation areas in the brain do not imply that there is no functional separation between the two languages at the neuronal or higher-order level.
Distinction of 2 subsystems: word identification vs. task/decision.
According to the BIA+ model shown in the figure, during word identification, the visual input activates the sublexical orthographic representations which simultaneously activate both the orthographic whole-word lexical and the sublexical phonological representations. Both whole-word orthographic and phonological representations then activate the semantic representations and language nodes which indicate membership to a particular language. All of this information is then used in the task/decision subsystem to carry out the remainder of the task at hand. The two subsystems are further described by the assumptions associated with them below.
This assumption states that language nodes/tags exist to provide a representation for the language of membership based on the information from upstream orthographic and phonological word ID processes. According to the BIA+ model, these tags have no effect on the activation level representation of words. The focus of activation of these nodes is postlexical: the existence of these nodes enables bilingual individuals not to get too much interference from the nontarget language while they process one of their language.
Parallel access assumes that language is nonselective and that both potential word choices are activated in the bilingual brain when exposed to the same stimulus. For example, test subjects reading in their second language have been found to unconsciously translate to their primary language. N400 stimulus response activation measurements show that semantic priming effects were seen in both languages and an individual cannot consciously focus their attention to only one language, even when told to ignore the second.
This language nonselective lexical access has been shown during semantic activation across languages, but also at the orthographic and phonological levels.
The temporal delay assumption is based on the principle of resting potential activation which reflects the frequency of word use by the bilingual such that high frequency words correlate to high resting level activation potentials, and words used with little frequency correlate to low resting level activation potentials. A high resting potential is one that is less negative or closer to zero, the point of activation, and therefore needs less stimuli in order to become activated. Because the less commonly used words of L2 have a lower resting level activation, L1 is likely to be activated before L2 as seen by N400 ERP patterns.
This resting level activation of words also reflects the proficiency level of bilinguals and their frequency of usage of the two languages. When a bilingual’s language proficiency is lower in L2 than L1, the activation of L2 lexical representations will be further delayed as more extensive or higher-level brain activation is necessary for language control. Both low and high proficiency bilinguals have parallel activation of the word representations, however the less proficient language, L2, becomes active more slowly contributing to the temporal delay assumption.
The locations of many of the word identification processing tasks have been determined with fMRI studies. Word retrieval is localized in Broca's area of the prefrontal cortex, whereas storage of information is localized in the inferior temporal lobes.
Globally, the same brain areas have been shown to be activated across the L1 and L2 in highly proficient bilinguals. Some subtle differences between L1 and L2 activations emerge though when testing lower proficient bilinguals.
The task/decision subsystem of the BIA+ model determines which actions must be executed for the task at hand based on the relevant information that becomes available after word identification processing. This subsystem involves many of the executive processes including monitoring and control associated with the prefrontal cortex.
"Bottom-up control of task/decision from word identification".
Action plans that meet the task at hand are executed by the task/decision system on the basis of activation information from the word identification subsystem. Studies that tested bilinguals with homographs showed that conflicts between target and non-target language readings of the homographs still led to a difference in activation between it and a control, implying that bilinguals are not able to regulate activation in the word identification system. Therefore, the action plans of the task/decision system have no direct influence on activations of word identification language subsystem.
The neural correlates of the task/ decision subsystem consist of multiple components that map onto different areas of prefrontal cortex responsible for executing control functions. For example, the general executive functions of language switching have been found to activate the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex areas.,
Translation, on the other hand, requires controlled actions in language representations and has been associated with the left basal ganglia, The left caudate nucleus has been associated with control of in-use language, and the left mid-prefrontal cortex is responsible for monitoring interference and suppressing competing responses between languages.,
According to the BIA+ model, when a bilingual with English as their primary language and Spanish as their secondary language translates the word "advertencia" from Spanish to English, several steps occur. The bilingual would use the orthographic and phonological cues to differentiate this word from the similar English word "advertisement". At this point, however, the bilingual automatically derives the semantic meaning of the word, not only for the correct Spanish meaning of advertencia which is "warning" but also for the Spanish meaning of advertisement which is "publicidad".
This information would then be stored in the bilingual’s working memory and used in the task/decision system to determine which of the two translations best fits the task at hand. Since the original instructions were to translate from Spanish to English, the bilingual would choose the correct translation of "advertencia" to be "warning" and not "advertisement".
While the BIA+ models shares several similarities with its predecessor, the BIA model, there are a few distinct differences that exist between the two. First and most notable is the purely bottom-up nature of the BIA+ model which assumes that information from the task/decision subsystem cannot influence the word identification subsystem, while the BIA model assumes that the two systems can fully interact.
Second is that the language membership nodes of the BIA+ model do not affect the activation levels of the word identification system, whereas they play an inhibitory role in the BIA model.
Finally participant expectations could potentially affect the task/decision system in the BIA+ model; however the BIA model assumes there is no strong effect on the activation state of words based on expectations.
The BIA+ model has been supported by many of the quantitative neuroimaging studies but more research needs to be completed in order to strengthen the model as a frontrunner in the accepted models for bilingual language processing. In the task/decision system, the task components are well-defined (e.g. translation, language switching) but the decision components involved in the execution of these tasks in the subsystem are underspecified. The relationship of the components in this subsystem need further exploration in order to be fully understood.
Scientists are also considering the use of magnetoencephalography (MEG) in future studies. This technology would link the spatial activation processes with the temporal patterns of brain response more accurately than simultaneously considering the response data from ERP and fMRI which are more limited.
Not only have studies suggested that the executive functioning of bilingualism extends beyond the language system, but bilinguals have also been shown to be faster processors who display fewer conflict effects than monolinguals in attentional tasks This research implies that there may be some spillover effects of learning a second language on other areas of cognitive function that could be explored.
One future direction theories on bilingual word recognition should take is the investigation of developmental aspects of bilingual lexical access. Most studies have investigated highly proficient bilinguals, but not many have looked at low-proficient bilinguals or even L2 learners. This new direction should prove to bring a lot of educational applications.
Expressive aphasia, also known as Broca's aphasia, is a type of aphasia characterized by partial loss of the ability to produce language (spoken, manual, or written), although comprehension generally remains intact. A person with expressive aphasia will exhibit effortful speech. Speech generally includes important content words but leaves out function words that have more grammatical significance than physical meaning, such as prepositions and articles. This is known as "telegraphic speech". The person's intended message may still be understood, but their sentence will not be grammatically correct. In very severe forms of expressive aphasia, a person may only speak using single word utterances. Typically, comprehension is mildly to moderately impaired in expressive aphasia due to difficulty understanding complex grammar.
It is caused by acquired damage to the anterior regions of the brain, such as Broca's area. It is one subset of a larger family of disorders known collectively as aphasia. Expressive aphasia contrasts with receptive aphasia, in which patients are able to speak in grammatical sentences that lack semantic significance and generally also have trouble with comprehension. Expressive aphasia differs from dysarthria, which is typified by a patient's inability to properly move the muscles of the tongue and mouth to produce speech. Expressive aphasia also differs from apraxia of speech, which is a motor disorder characterized by an inability to create and sequence motor plans for speech.
Broca's (expressive) aphasia is a type of non-fluent aphasia in which an individual's speech is halting and effortful. Misarticulations or distortions of consonants and vowels, namely phonetic dissolution, are common. Individuals with expressive aphasia may only produce single words, or words in groups of two or three. Long pauses between words are common and multi-syllabic words may be produced one syllable at a time with pauses between each syllable. The prosody of a person with Broca's aphasia is compromised by shortened length of utterances and the presence of self-repairs and disfluencies. Intonation and stress patterns are also deficient.
Self-monitoring is typically well preserved in patients with Broca's aphasia. They are usually aware of their communication deficits, and are more prone to depression and outbursts from frustration than are patients with other forms of aphasia.[7]
In general, word comprehension is preserved, allowing patients to have functional receptive language skills. Individuals with Broca's aphasia understand most of the everyday conversation around them, but higher-level deficits in receptive language can occur. Because comprehension is substantially impaired for more complex sentences, it is better to use simple language when speaking with an individual with expressive aphasia. This is exemplified by the difficulty to understand phrases or sentences with unusual structure. A typical patient with Broca's aphasia will misinterpret "the man is bitten by the dog" by switching the subject and object to “the dog is bitten by the man.”
Typically, people with expressive aphasia can understand speech and read better than they can produce speech and write. The person's writing will resemble their speech and will be effortful, lacking cohesion, and containing mostly content words. Letters will likely be formed clumsily and distorted and some may even be omitted. Although listening and reading are generally intact, subtle deficits in both reading and listening comprehension are almost always present during assessment of aphasia.
Because Broca's area is anterior to the primary motor cortex, which is responsible for movement of the face, hands, and arms, a lesion affecting Broca's areas may also result in hemiparesis (weakness of both limbs on the same side of the body) or hemiplegia (paralysis of both limbs on the same side of the body). The brain is wired contralaterally, which means the limbs on right side of the body are controlled by the left hemisphere and vice versa. Therefore, when Broca's area or surrounding areas in the left hemisphere are damaged, hemiplegia or hemiparesis often occurs on the right side of the body in individuals with Broca's aphasia.
Severity of expressive aphasia varies among patients. Some people may only have mild deficits and detecting problems with their language may be difficult. In the most extreme cases, patients may be able to produce only a single word. Even in such cases, over-learned and rote-learned speech patterns may be retained– for instance, some patients can count from one to ten, but cannot produce the same numbers in novel conversation.
In addition to difficulty expressing oneself, individuals with expressive aphasia are also noted to commonly have trouble with comprehension in certain linguistic areas. This agrammatism overlaps with receptive aphasia, but can be seen in patients who have expressive aphasia without being diagnosed as having receptive aphasia. The most well-noted of these are object-relative clauses, object Wh- questions, and topicalized structures (placing the topic at the beginning of the sentence). These three concepts all share phrasal movement, which can cause words to lose their thematic roles when they change order in the sentence. This is often not an issue for people without agrammatic aphasias, but many people with aphasia rely heavily on word order to understand roles that words play within the sentence.
The most common cause of expressive aphasia is stroke. A stroke is caused by hypoperfusion (lack of oxygen) to an area of the brain, which is commonly caused by thrombosis or embolism. Some form of aphasia occurs in 34 to 38% of stroke patients. Expressive aphasia occurs in approximately 12% of new cases of aphasia caused by stroke.
In most cases, expressive aphasia is caused by a stroke in Broca's area or the surrounding vicinity. Broca's area is in the lower part of the premotor cortex in the language dominant hemisphere and is responsible for planning motor speech movements. However, cases of expressive aphasia have been seen in patients with strokes in other areas of the brain. Patients with classic symptoms of expressive aphasia in general have more acute brain lesions, whereas patients with larger, widespread lesions exhibit a variety of symptoms that may be classified as global aphasia or left unclassified.
Expressive aphasia can also be caused by trauma to the brain, tumor, cerebral hemorrhage and by extradural abscess.
Understanding lateralization of brain function is important for understanding which areas of the brain cause expressive aphasia when damaged. In the past, it has been believed that the area for language production differs between left and right-handed individuals. If this were true, damage to the homologous region of Broca's area in the right hemisphere should cause aphasia in a left-handed individual. More recent studies have shown that even left-handed individuals typically have language functions only in the left hemisphere. However, left-handed individuals are more likely to have a dominance of language in the right hemisphere.
Less common causes of expressive aphasia include primary autoimmune phenomenon and autoimmune phenomenon that are secondary to cancer (as a paraneoplastic syndrome) have been listed as the primary hypothesis for several cases of aphasia, especially when presenting with other psychiatric disturbances and focal neurological deficits. Many case reports exist describing paraneoplastic aphasia, and the reports that are specific tend to describe expressive aphasia. Although most cases attempt to exclude micrometastasis, it is likely that some cases of paraneoplastic aphasia are actually extremely small metastasis to the vocal motor regions.
Neurodegenerative disorders may present with aphasia. Alzheimer's disease may present with either fluent aphasia or expressive aphasia. There are case reports of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease presenting with expressive aphasia.
Expressive aphasia is classified as non-fluent aphasia, as opposed to fluent aphasia. Diagnosis is done on a case-by-case basis, as lesions often affect the surrounding cortex and deficits are highly variable among patients with aphasia.
A physician is typically the first person to recognize aphasia in a patient who is being treated for damage to the brain. Routine processes for determining the presence and location of lesion in the brain include magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) scans. The physician will complete a brief assessment of the patient's ability to understand and produce language. For further diagnostic testing, the physician will refer the patient to a speech-language pathologist, who will complete a comprehensive evaluation.
In order to diagnose a patient who is suffering from Broca's aphasia, there are certain commonly used tests and procedures. The Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) classifies individuals based on their scores on the subtests; spontaneous speech, auditory comprehension, repetition, and naming. The Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (BDAE) can inform users what specific type of aphasia they may have, infer the location of lesion, and assess current language abilities. The Porch Index of Communication Ability (PICA) can predict potential recovery outcomes of the patients with aphasia. Quality of life measurement is also an important assessment tool. Tests such as the Assessment for Living with Aphasia (ALA) and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) allow for therapists to target skills that are important and meaningful for the individual.
In addition to formal assessments, patient and family interviews are valid and important sources of information. The patient's previous hobbies, interests, personality, and occupation are all factors that will not only impact therapy but may motivate them throughout the recovery process. Patient interviews and observations allow professionals to learn the priorities of the patient and family and determine what the patient hopes to regain in therapy. Observations of the patient may also be beneficial to determine where to begin treatment. The current behaviors and interactions of the patient will provide the therapist with more insight about the client and their individual needs. Other information about the patient can be retrieved from medical records, patient referrals from physicians, and the nursing staff.
In non-speaking patients who use manual languages, diagnosis is often based on interviews from the patient's acquaintances, noting the differences in sign production pre- and post-damage to the brain. Many of these patients will also begin to rely on non-linguistic gestures to communicate, rather than signing since their language production is hindered.
Currently, there is no standard treatment for expressive aphasia. Most aphasia treatment is individualized based on a patient's condition and needs as assessed by a speech language pathologist. Patients go through a period of spontaneous recovery following brain injury in which they regain a great deal of language function.