| Summary: | 碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 語言學系 === 81 === This thesis is a preliminary study exploring the sychological
processing mechanism involved in the comprehension of Chinese
topic chains with zero anaphora in subject positions. We
investigate the developmental performance of normal children
(4:0-6:0) as well as the performance of aphasic patients. Two
kinds of associative memory theories (Wickelgren 1979) are
proposed for interpretation. They are the horizontal
association and the vertical association hypothesis. Three
types of topic chains differing in number of clauses, ranging
from two to four, were constructed for testing. In each trial
of the comprehension task, a question about who performed the
action of the last proposition in each passage was asked.
Statistical results indicate that four-year-old children depend
totally on the horizontal association scheme. At thef five,
children began to make fewer errors on the four-pic chains,
indicating the emergence of verticalround the age of six, most
children have learnedation to help process Chinese topic chain
From the performance of aphasic subjects, it showed that Broca'
s aphasics displayed a similar error pattern as four-year- old
children. Contrastively, Wernicke's aphasics showed aimilar
pattern to six-year-old children. Thestudy
are summarized as follows: (1) In the comprehension of Chinese
topic chains with zeronaphora, the underlying psychological
processes involved include vertical association. (2) Vertical
association begins to developt the age five, and becomes
established around six.patterns of performance in Chinese
reference resolution of zero anaphora in Broca's and Wernicke's
aphasias were found. This difference in psychological
processing may provide useful criteria for the clinical
diagnosis of these two classes of aphasias.
|
|---|
