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Research Article
Investigating the Impact of Semantic Operations on Persian-
Speaking Aphasics: Further Evidence on the Localization
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Omid Azad
1*
, Mousa Ghonchepour
2
1. Department of Linguistics, School of Humanities, University of Gonabad, Gonabad, Iran.
2. Department of Language and Literature, Faculty of Language and Literature, Farhangian University, Tehran, Iran.
* Corresponding Author:
Omid Azad, Assistant Professor.
Address: Department of Linguistics, School of Humanities, University of Gonabad, Gonabad, Iran.
Tel: +98 (911) 3203468
E-mail: oazadling@gmail.com
Introduction: Broca and Wernicke’s patients perform satisfactorily regarding the processing
of canonical syntactic structures, as maintained by previous studies; however, there has been
a gap in the literature because no particular research has yet investigated the performance of
these patients in the Persian circumstances once they were required to analyze sentences which
would demand extra-semantic processing. This study clarifies the role of two critical semantic
operations demanding extra-semantic processing at the sentential level: Aspectual coercion.
It complements to provide some evidence on the localist view of the brain. Our rationale for
selecting these operations was their pure semantic nature, not relying on morphosyntactic
properties.
Materials and Methods: Having recruited two age- and education-matched Broca, two
Wernicke, and four healthy controls, we conducted a semantic judgment task in which the
participants were asked to express their correct semantic judgment in the two coercion and two
normal conditions.
Results: Our results showed an approximately above-chance performance of the Broca group
for all conditions; however, in the Wernicke group, the same result was not observed due to
their poor performance in coercion conditions, though in ordinary sentences, they performed
much better.
Conclusion: Our findings, along with similar off-line and imaging studies, corroborate the
view of localism, based on which Wernicke’s area is mainly responsible for the primary
semantic operations while Broca’s area predominantly takes over syntactic parsing.
A B S T R A C T
Citation Azad O, Ghonchepour M. Investigating the Impact of Semantic Operations on Persian-Speaking Aphasics: Further
Evidence on the Localization View. Journal of Modern Rehabilitation. 2024; 18(1):33-40.
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Article info:
Received: 19 Oct 2021
Accepted: 02 Aug 2022
Available Online: 01 Jan 2024
Keywords:
Aphasia; Coercion; Localization
January 2024, Volume 18, Number 1