Abstract
This thesis aims to investigate Mandarin Chinese-speaking aphasic patients’ elicited production and comprehension of monosyllabic unergatives (e.g. ku ‘cry’) and unaccusatives (e.g. dao ‘collapse’) in sentence contexts and their comprehension of the other four types of sentences, including actives, passives, subject relatives and object relatives. Furthermore, this thesis also attempts to evaluate the validity of the predictions of four linguistically based hypotheses on Mandarin aphasic patients’ comprehension and production of those sentence types we have scrutinized, including the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), the Double Dependency Hypothesis (DDH), the Argument Linking Hypothesis (ALH), and the Argument Structure Complexity Hypothesis (ASCH). For the elicited production task of unergative and unaccusative sentences (Experiment I), the findings support the ASCH which predicts that unaccusative verbs with a more complex argument structure are more difficult for agrammatic aphasic patients to produce than unergatives with a less complex argument structure. In addition, for the comprehension task of unergative and unaccusative sentences (Experiment II), the results that Mandarin aphasic patients performed relatively well on both sentence types confirm the prediction of the ALH that agrammatic aphasic patients will perform above-chance on the two types of sentences. Finally, for the comprehension task of four sentence types (Experiment II), both the TDH and the ALH predict that the word order discrepancy will make subject relative clauses more complicated and difficult to comprehend for Mandarin agrammatics than object relative clauses, but the DDH predicts the opposite pattern of selective deficits. The results from our Mandarin agrammatic aphasic patients’ selective comprehension deficits verify the predictions of the TDH and the ALH. The findings of this study suggest that the complexity of argument structures (i.e. complex vs. simple) and the canonicity of thematic role order (i.e. canonical Agent-Theme order vs. non-canonical Theme-Agent order) will hinder appropriate processing at the level of production and comprehension for non-fluent agrammatic aphasic patients.