The influence of parents' aphasia on children's first language acquisition

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, RWTH Aachen University (Department for Linguistics and Cognitive Semiotics), language: English, abstract: What happens if parents suffer from aphasia? Will their children's first language acquisition be influenced? The following terms paper shall probe into these questions. People suffering from the language disorder aphasia have difficulties in understanding and uttering language. They produce inappropriate or distorted words and cannot accept summons. Through this, communication with other human beings becomes problematic. The appearances of aphasia are very different: often the disease is that distinctive that aphasics cannot produce speech voluntarily or, on the other hand, they need more time to find the words they are searching for. Jakobson claims that, as aphasia is an impairment of language, a competent linguistic examination of what in the pa-tient's language is impaired is needed for making an exact diagnosis. Concerning Roch Lecours and Lhermitte, Jakobson is not only the one who has given neurolinguistic research an enormous impetus, but also suggests one of the first linguistic theories of aphasia. Due to that, this paper will first mainly focus on Jakobson's linguistic theory based on clinical case studies conducted by Goldstein. For a better and clearer understanding I decided to differentiate two types of aphasia concerning Jakobson, namely similarity disorder and contiguity disorder, which both include different aspects or rather subtypes.