Selective Impairment in Verb Inflection: Evidence from Persian Agrammatism

Journal of Language and Translation

دوره 13، شماره 3، مهر 2023، صفحه 161-171   

نوع مقاله: Research Articles

شناسه دیجیتال (DOI): 10.30495/ttlt.2023.705461

نویسندگان

Leila Salehnejad¹؛ Mansoore Shekaramiz^{* 1}؛ Elkhas Veisi²؛ Nastaran Majdinasab³

¹Department of Linguistics, Ahvaz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Iran

²Department of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, Payame Noor University, Iran

³Department of Neurology, Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran

چکیده

Impaired morpho-syntactic production is the hallmark of agrammatic aphasia. It has been shown across several languages that verb inflection is difficult for agrammatic aphasic speakers. Many studies have indicated that this deficit is selective. Agreement is relatively preserved, while tense is severely impaired. The present work is based on Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis (Fyndanis, 2012) which believes that categories with uninterpretable features (e.g. Agr) are better preserved than categories with interpretable features (e.g. Tense & Aspect). It is argued that the increased processing demands of Tense and Aspect, which carry interpretable features, render them more vulnerable compared to Agreement, which bears an uninterpretable feature and is a local, strictly grammatical operation. A sentence completion task tapping subject-verb agreement and tense and a picture description task were administered to two native speakers of Persian with agrammatic aphasia. The patients were classified as Broca's aphasics according to the Persian aphasia test, their MRI reports and CT Scans. They were asked to participate in a battery of tests designed to assess their abilities in production of inflectional morphology. Results showed that all the agrammatic speakers performed as hypothesized. Overall, the tense was significantly more impaired than agreement.

کلیدواژه‌ها

Agrammatism؛ Tense؛ Agreement؛ Interpretable Features' Impairment Hypothesis

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