Negative polarity environments in the spontaneous speech of Dutch individuals with aphasia

Abstract

In the current study, I will investigate the production of negative polarity items and especially the context in which they occur in a group of 10 non-fluent speakers with Broca’s aphasia and compare these with those of a group of 10 fluent speakers (diagnosed with either anomic aphasia or Wernicke’s aphasia) and 10 control speakers in spontaneous speech. Although especially non-fluent speakers do have problems in producing grammatical sentences, it has been shown that negation seems to be spared in these speakers. In contrast however to the large number of negations produced by the aphasic speakers, the number of negative polarity environments was strikingly low as compared to the control speakers in this study. Although not all individual control speakers used such environments, this clearly contrasted the number of cases of such environments in the group of control speakers.