A Quantitative and Qualitative Study on How Chinese Incomplete Motor Aphasics Recognize Chinese Language Chunks

By employing quantitative and qualitative methods，the present article aims to study how Chinese incomplete motor aphasics recognize Chinese language chunks，and why they have a lot of difficulties in recognizing them.Findings are as follows：（1）Aphasics'recognition ability of Chinese language chunks has been greatly damaged，but their aural and visual recognition abilities of chunks don't vary very much；（2）Aphasics have great difficulties in recognizing metaphoric and metonymic phrases，fixed phrases（Chinese idioms and idiomatic expressions）with emotional meanings，and fixed collocations with negative meanings；（3）In recognizing noun phrases，aphasics'recognition ability is very similar to normals'.Reasons for their reduced ability to recognize Chinese language chunks are mainly two：①Chinese language chunks consist of complicated grammar structure，logic structure and semantic structure，which increase the cognitive burdens of aphasics；②Aphasics'cognitive ability or specifically conceptual blending ability is greatly damaged，which makes the chunks recognition tasks harder.This study is helpful for further studies on the connections between brain damages and structures of Chinese language chunks.It can also help us to replenish some relative linguistic theories and to find ways to connect language chunks with the recovery of aphasics.