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Article published In: Words in the World
Edited by Laura Teddiman, Lori Buchanan and Hamad Al-Azary
[The Mental Lexicon 19:1] 2024
► pp. 25–36

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Tense and agreement processing in native Spanish speakers with aphasia

ORCiD logo with link | Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Lingüística | Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
 | Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Lingüística | Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
 | Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Lingüística
 | Universidad de Buenos Aires, Instituto de Lingüística | Universidad Nacional de Hurlingham, Instituto de Educación
Published online: 16 December 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ml.24019.ste
Abstract
Several cross-linguistic studies have reported an impairment of verbal morphosyntax in People with Aphasia (PWA), highlighting a greater impact on tense morphology in contrast to agreement-inflectional morphology (Benedet, M. J., Christiansen, J. A. & Goodglass, H. (1998). A cross-linguistic study of grammatical morphology in Spanish- and English- speaking agrammatic patients. Cortex 341, 309–336.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Friedmann, N. & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 561, 397–425. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (2000). Split inflection in neurolinguistics. In M.-A. Friedemann and L. Rizzi (Eds.) The acquisition of syntax: Studies in comparative developmental linguistics (pp. 84- 104). Geneva, Switzerland: Longman Linguistics Library Series.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Gavarró, A., & Martínez-Ferreiro, S. (2007). Tense and agreement impairment in Ibero-Romance. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 361, 11, 25–46. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Kok, P., van Doorn, A., & Kolk, H. (2007). Inflection and computational load in agrammatic speech. Brain and Language, 102(3), 273–283. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Wenzlaff, M. & Clahsen, H. (2004). Tense and agreement in German agrammatism. Brain and Language 891, 57–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The Diacritical Encoding and Retrieval Hypothesis (DERH, Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. (2007). Verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia: Encoding of tense features. Journal of Memory and Language, 56(1), 129–151. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) postulates that this deficit is due to a specific difficulty projecting the semantic time information to the morphosyntax of verbs, related to processing limitations in PWA. This study aimed to assess the processing of the tense and agreement inflection in Spanish-speaking PWA. A group of 9 PWA completed four tasks designed to study verbal inflection production and comprehension in Spanish: Sentence Completion, Sentence Elicitation, Grammaticality Judgements and Sentence-Picture Matching. As expected, PWA showed a significatively greater impairment in tense inflection compared to agreement inflection. Furthermore, the analysis showed that this differential impairment manifested when PWA were asked to encode semantic time information and retrieve the corresponding verb morphology. These findings are consistent with the postulates of the DERH.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Method
    • Participants
    • Materials and procedure
  • Comprehension tasks
    • Sentence-Picture Matching (SPM)
    • Grammaticality Judgements (GJ)
  • Production tasks
    • Sentence Elicitation (SE)
    • Sentence Completion (SC)
      • Scoring criteria
      • Data Analysis
  • Results
    • Comprehension tasks
    • Production tasks
  • Discussion
  • Note
  • References
References (29)
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