Verbal Inflection Processing in Spanish Speakers with Aphasia: Time and Agreement

EasyChair Preprint 6603

Abstract

Introduction
There is substantial cross-linguistic evidence that morphosyntax of verbs is impaired in agrammatic aphasia and that tense morphology is especially vulnerable (Benedet et al., 1998; Caramazza & Hillis, 1991, Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997). Two explanations for this deficit focus on the processing costs that the grammatical operations impose on People with Aphasia. The PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH. Bastiaanse et al, 2011) posits that reference to the past is particularly harder to produce because it requires discourse linking, which is affected in aphasia. Faroqi-Shah & Thompson (2007) suggest that there is a special difficulty in the retrieval of the accurate verb forms which affects temporal reference in general in tensed verbs. Our work aims to study these difficulties in agrammatic aphasia to obtain evidence in Argentinian Spanish and discuss if the current hypotheses can account for it adequately.
Methods
Two PWA with agrammatism and two groups of healthy people matched in age and education level participated in the study. All native Argentinian Spanish speakers. We developed an assessment battery to tap the production and comprehension of verbal inflection of tense and agreement on isolated verbs and sentences. It’s composed of five tasks: Sentence completion, Sentence elicitation, Picture-guided elicitation, Grammaticality judgment, Sentence-picture matching.
Results
Preliminary results show that HPG performed at ceiling level in the first two tasks, while PWA encountered great difficulties, especially with Tense.
Conclusions
Results show a clear deficit in the processing of verbal inflection in the PWA compared to the HP. These data need to be completed and compared with the results for the remaining three tasks to arrive at conclusions on the explanatory adequacy of the presented hypotheses and understand the specific pattern for Argentinian Spanish in greater detail.

Keyphrases: agrammatism, aphasia, tense, verbal inflection

@booklet{EasyChair:6603,
  author    = {Camila Stecher and María Elina Sánchez and Virginia Jaichenco},
  title     = {Verbal Inflection Processing in Spanish Speakers with Aphasia: Time and Agreement},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6603},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}