‘Seeing and thinking for speaking’ across languages: spatial encoding and attention allocation in agrammatic aphasia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2012/05/0028/000234Keywords:
spatial language, eye movements, agrammatismAbstract
Current typological research has shown that languages encode space in strikingly different ways, mapping spatial concepts onto divergent lexical and syntactic structures. These typological properties seem to strongly guide speakers’ "speaking" and "thinking" in both typical and atypical (pathological) contexts. Such asymmetries in the distribution of lexical and grammatical elements are also particularly interesting for the study of agrammatic speakers, who frequently show dissociations between these two elements when speaking. The present research investigates whether language-specific factors influence how speakers of typologically different languages, both with and without agrammatism, encode motion events verbally (speaking), as well as how they allocate their visual attention (seeing) when constructing spatial representations (thinking).
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