Investigating the Effects of Animacy and Thematic Roles on Word Order in the Sentences of Persian Aphasia

Brain damages and aphasia resulting from them are very common and their early detection is vital. Description of aphasic patients’ language and speech abilities can lead to the disorder diagnosis, its evaluation, and screening. By making use of a descriptive-analytic method, the present research intended to determine the language disorders caused by brain damages and show how the structural differences of languages affect aphasia symptoms among the patients at the speech therapy centers of Tehran. The control group included 10 safe and sound people, who were thoroughly the same as the case group composed of 7 patients in terms of age, education, and language. The tests included an oral and a written test. The studied people had to describe some pictures in the oral test and were supposed to unscramble some sentences in the written test. The findings indicated that the control group used agent-theme orders for describing the pictures without regarding animacy, while animacy was an effective factor on the order of noun phrases in the sentences and led to pre-posing of the themes in some cases. Additionally, it seemed that in patients with brain damages, animacy concept was an effective factor on the order of noun phrases in the sentences.