Salmons & Gavarró (2022). Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatism

Autors:

Io Salmons & Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatism

Editorial: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics (Open Library of Humanities)
Data de publicació: 31 de desembre del 2022

Text complet

The goal of the present study is to test the agrammatic comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus in Catalan, in order to evaluate the Generalised Minimality hypothesis of Grillo (2009). According to this hypothesis, the comprehension deficit observed in agrammatism is the result of the underspecification of scope-discourse features giving rise to generalised intervention effects. We conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks to assess the comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus with nine and seven Broca’s aphasic subjects, respectively, as well as control participants. The results show that the comprehension of SVO sentences and object clitics was preserved, whereas the comprehension of object dislocations and object focalisations was compromised. These findings are consistent with the analysis of the deficit as an instance of generalised intervention effects. Yet, we also examined the prediction that a relevant syntactic feature mismatch between the subject and the object would suffice to block generalised minimality effects; in particular, the number features of subject and object were controlled for. The agrammatic subjects’ performance on mismatched sentences did not differ from their performance on sentences where the subject and the object were matched in number. These findings call the hypothesis into question and stress the need for future research.

Salmons, I. & Muntañé-Sánchez, H. (2026) Adaptation and normative data for the Comprehensive Aphasia Test in Catalan (CAT-CAT)

Autors:

Io Salmons & Helena Muntané-Sánchez

Títol:

Adaptation and normative data for the Comprehensive Aphasia Test in Catalan (CAT-CAT)

Editorial: Cortex
Data de publicació: 2026
ISBN13: 0010-9452

Text complet

Assessment tools for diagnosing aphasia in languages other than English are scarce, particularly for minority languages such as Catalan. The present study introduces the Catalan adaptation of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT-CAT), the first assessment tool of its kind in Catalan, which was developed with careful consideration of cultural and psycholinguistic factors. Additionally, the study provides normative data based on a sample of 110 Catalan-dominant speakers without language or speech disorders in order to establish the range of non-pathological performance and cut-off scores. We also examined the role of sociodemographic factors on language skills in multilingual speakers of a minority language, a topic often overlooked in the literature. Our findings show that subtests evaluating writing skills in Catalan-speaking individuals are less reliable than those assessing oral abilities, as many Catalan speakers have not received formal instruction in their mother tongue. This factor influences performance more than other variables, such as education level. Notably, language-mixing effects from Spanish were observed mainly in specific production subtests. These findings emphasize the need for language-specific adaptations and, therefore, the value of the CAT–CAT as a tool for both clinical and research purposes in aphasiology.