Inflectional morphology and word order in agrammatic production: A cross-linguistic study of Moroccan Arabic and English

Background: Verb production has been shown to be impaired in individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia. Several theories have linked this deficit to problems with the implementation of grammatical information that the verb contains. In particular, the number and type of arguments associated with a verb were suggested as causes of production difficulties in agrammatic speakers. The influence of these two factors on agrammatic production has been investigated in English and Dutch (Bastiaanse & Van Zonneveld, 2005; Thompson, 2003). Aims: The present study focuses on exploring these factors in a structurally different language. Russian, with its rich morphology and relatively free word order, is of interest because it enables not only testing of earlier advanced hypotheses on agrammatic production, but also specification of them at some essential points. Methods & Procedures: A sentence production priming paradigm was used that was based on the method developed by Thompson, Lange, Schneider, and Shapiro (1997) which allows a particular verb and sentence construction to be elicited. Six conditions included sentences with different numbers of arguments (one or two), different types of thematic role mapping (direct or indirect), and different word order (basic or scrambled). The test contained 60 items, 10 items per condition. In all, 16 individuals with agrammatic aphasia and 16 non‐brain‐damaged individuals participated in the study. Outcomes & Results: Cross‐linguistic significance of the earlier advanced hypotheses was demonstrated: the increased number of verb arguments and syntactic operations concerning constituent movement cause production problems for Russian agrammatic speakers. Moreover, the data show that agrammatic speech difficulties are related to the number of arguments explicitly mentioned in a sentence, to the number of operations applied to the syntactic structure of a produced sentence, and to changing the base‐generated position of a constituent (not to the order of the constituents per se). Conclusions: The study provides further evidence that verb production is selectively impaired in agrammatic aphasia. This deficit is related to the implementation of the grammatical information that a verb contains and the syntactic operations applied to basic structures.

Speech-language pathologists who serve people with aphasia must be prepared to evaluate and treat agrammatism. We focus here on fundamental information about this communication disorder, particularly its features in English, dialects of English, and several different languages around the world. It is important to examine agrammatism across dialects and languages, since the disorder is not uncommon, and it is manifested differently, depending on the grammatical structure of the dialect or language in question.

Word order is the way in which languages establish the relationship between a verb and its arguments. The world's spoken languages have been classified into three major word orders: SOV, SVO, and VSO. As other word orders have also been identified, linguists have found it necessary to investigate and define the relevance of semantic (animate/inanimate, agent/patient) and pragmatic (topic/ comment) notions in order to determine their relevance to the ordering of elements. Different sign orders were tested in all of the possible combinations of noun and verb phrases and then verified in different text formats in order to classify the possible sign orders and analyze the influence of pragmatic and semantic notions. Deaf people from all over Argentina participated as informants. The intuition of native signers was also taken into consideration. The analysis of the corpus was completed with participant observation within the Deaf community and in different Deaf associations throughout Argentina. The canonical sign order in Argentine Sign Language was found to be SOV for sentences with transitive verbs and SV with intransitive ones. Sentences with modal verbs exhibit a different sign order. Variations of the canonical sign order occur according to various linguistic constraints and pragmatic purposes.

Background: Comprehension of semantically reversible sentences is often impaired in Broca's aphasia. When the arguments in such sentences are in derived order, they are more difficult to comprehend than when they are not. Most studies on this topic are of English, a morphologically poor language; only a few experiments have examined sentence comprehension in case-marking languages. These studies tested sentences in which word order was varied while case was kept constant. Their results suggest that case does not improve comprehension of derived order sentences. The present study is on the comprehension of semantically reversible sentences in Turkish Broca's aphasia. Turkish, with its flexible word order and rich case morphology, is well suited to this investigation because there is an interaction between word order and case, which is known to influence sentence production in this aphasia type (Yarbay Duman, Aygen, & Bastiaanse, 2008). Aims: The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of word order and case information on the auditory comprehension of semantically reversible sentences in Turkish Broca's aphasia to find out whether an interaction between word order and case, similar to the one found in production, can be observed in sentence comprehension. Methods & Procedures: A comprehension test with five reversible sentence types (base order active sentences, sentences with object scrambling, subject relatives, object relatives, and passives) was developed. Sentences in base and derived word order varied in their use of case. Sentences with base case (subject = nominative; object = accusative) and non-base case were included to evaluate the interplay between word order and case separately. Outcomes & Results: The results showed that both word order and case influenced sentence comprehension. Clauses were comprehended best when there was both base (unambiguous) case and base word order information (base order active sentences). Performance dropped if there was base case information but derived word order (object scrambling and subject relatives). When there was neither base case information nor base word order (object relatives and passives), clauses were comprehended least well. Conclusions: The sentence comprehension deficit in Turkish Broca's aphasia is due to a problem in assigning thematic roles to the noun phrases by integrating syntactic word order and case information. Such an integration problem is in line with previous findings on sentence production in Turkish and the Integration Problem Hypothesis (IPH: Yarbay Duman, 2009).

One aspect in which languages vary is their differing patterns of word ordering in sentences. Some languages follow a restrictive word order, whereas others allow a flexible word order that does not affect the semantics of the text. In the literature, the Arabic language is deemed one of the flexible or “free word order” languages, which allow both VSO and SVO word orders without changing a clause’s meaning. The present study aims to identify the pragmatic (morpholexical and discourse) factors that play a significant role in determining the variable subject-verb word order in spoken Saudi Arabic. A corpus-based approach was taken by collecting a sufficient amount of natural spoken Saudi utterances for analysis. The corpus contains data collected from six recorded Saudi Arabic TV interviews with Saudi personalities in which the guests related personal stories about their social and practical lives. A classification system proposed by Owens et al. (2009) was adopted as a study tool to distinguish between the diverse factors that may predict the variant word order in spoken Saudi Arabic and to determine whether any relationship exists between such factors. The study found that the distributions of SV and VS word orders in spoken Saudi Arabic are similar, with a slightly higher percentage in SV word order (58% SV vs. 42% VS), and that the morpholexical class of subjects significantly predicts word order. The findings also indicate that discourse-pragmatic functions play an important role in predicting word order.

Standard Arabic (SA) has two basic patterns that are SVO and VSO. On light of Government and Binding Theory (GB), these word orders are illustrated in relation to the AGR Criterion that accounts for the restrictions on agreement associated with the two word orders in SA. Examples from Standard Arabic (SA) and Moroccan Arabic (MA) with reference to the Expletive Hypothesis show some of the problems related to rich or full agreement in SVO structures. Also, the issue of poor agreement or partial agreement in VSO structures is extensively discussed in SA and MA respectively. The researcher concludes with the evidence that AGR Criterion is responsible to regulate the features between AGRs and the NP-subjects in accordance with their positions in the sentence, whether in SVO or VSO structures.

Passive Sentence Comprehension in Thai Agrammatic Speakers

An important question in understanding language processing is whether there are distinct neural mechanisms for processing specific types of grammatical structure, such as syntax versus morphology, and, if so, what the basis of the specialization might be. However, this question is difficult to study: A given language typically conveys its grammatical information in one way (e.g., English marks "who did what to whom" using word order, and German uses inflectional morphology). American Sign Language permits either device, enabling a direct within-language comparison. During functional (f)MRI, native signers viewed sentences that used only word order and sentences that included inflectional morphology. The two sentence types activated an overlapping network of brain regions, but with differential patterns. Word order sentences activated left-lateralized areas involved in working memory and lexical access, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, the inferior parietal lobe, and the middle temporal gyrus. In contrast, inflectional morphology sentences activated areas involved in building and analyzing combinatorial structure, including bilateral inferior frontal and anterior temporal regions as well as the basal ganglia and medial temporal/limbic areas. These findings suggest that for a given linguistic function, neural recruitment may depend upon on the cognitive resources required to process specific types of linguistic cues.

Effects of word order and morphological information on Japanese sentence comprehension in nonfluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia

This research explores the syntactic and pragmatic aspects that condition word order flexibility in Pashto and English, comparing how the two languages communicate emphasis, focus, and topicalization. This paper compares the flexibility of sentence structure allowed by Pashto’s case-marking system in comparison to English’s rigid SVO word order, drawing on data from the Pashto National Corpus (2022) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The findings reveals that Pashto facilitates much more fluid rearrangements according to pragmatic needs for sentence parts, such as focusing on the subject, object, or verb, while in English, auxiliary structures and cleft sentences are used to achieve the same. This research concluded that though both languages use pragmatic variables for adjusting word order, Pashto’s case-marking system has a syntactic advantage which makes word order changes more fluid and easier. This study highlights the syntactic restrictions in English that call for additional structural mechanisms in order to modify word order. These findings are helpful for understanding of cross-linguistic syntax and pragmatic variations as well as how syntactic structures and communication needs affect word order flexibility.

Language comprehension relies on integrating the perceived utterance with prior expectations. Previous investigations of expectations about sentence structure (the structural prior) have found that comprehenders often interpret rare constructions nonliterally. However, this work has mostly relied on analytic languages like English, where word order is the main way to indicate syntactic relations in the sentence. This raises the possibility that the structural prior over word order is not a universal part of the sentence processing toolkit, but rather a tool acquired only by speakers of languages where word order has special importance as the main source of syntactic information in the sentence. Moving away from English to make conclusions about more general cognitive strategies (Blasi et al., 2022), we investigate whether the structural prior over word order is a part of language processing more universally using Hindi and Russian, synthetic languages with flexible word order. We conducted two studies in Hindi (Ns = 50, 57, the latter preregistered) and three studies with the same materials, translated, in Russian (Ns = 50, 100, 100, all preregistered), manipulating plausibility and structural frequency. Structural frequency was manipulated by comparing simple clauses with the canonical word order (subject-object-verb in Hindi, subject-verb-object in Russian) to ones with a noncanonical (low frequency) word order (object-subject-verb in Hindi, object-verb-subject in Russian). We found that noncanonical sentences were interpreted nonliterally more often than canonical sentences, even though we used flexible-word-order languages. We conclude that the structural prior over word order is always evaluated in language processing, regardless of language type. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Aramaic is a language affiliated with the north-west Semitic languages, which include Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Hebrew. A common characteristic of Semitic languages is the initial position of the verb within the sentence. However, the word order in Biblical Aramaic, the formal Aramaic language is very different from that of the north-west Semitic languages. This in-depth study examines all the sentences in Biblical Aramaic, specifically the 1002 Biblical Aramaic clauses, in order to explore word order. Sentence types (verbal, nominal, participial, and HAVA [=to be] sentences, etc.), verb forms, subject-predicate-object word order, descriptive and colloquial styles, tense, independent and subordinate clauses, etc. were considered.BR The greatest differences appear in the word orders of verbal sentences. All possible word orders, i.e. all the six word orders appear in sentences where subject, verb, and object are included, while the word orders of VO and OV account for almost half of the samples when the orders of verbs and objects are considered. Thus, verbal sentences in Biblical Aramaic can be said to have flexible word orders.BR To determine what factors influence word order in Biblical Aramaic, we have employed various parameters in our investigations, and made comparisons with the word orders of Biblical Hebrew, Akkadian and Ugaritic languages, Arabic, and Sumerian, the most ancient language. However, no linguistic factors were discovered, and thus it was noted that examining geographic and historical factors was necessary. We conclude that movement by the Aramaic people following the national migration policy of the Neo-Assyrian Empire resulted in Biblical Aramaic or formal Aramaic having the flexible word order, as the original ancient Aramaic from the eastern area of Mesopotamia received influence from the Akkadian language used in the area to where migration took place.

While natural languages differ widely in both canonical word order and word order flexibility, their word orders still follow shared cross-linguistic statistical patterns, often attributed to functional pressures. In the effort to identify these pressures, prior work has compared real and counterfactual word orders. Yet one functional pressure has been overlooked in such investigations: The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis, which holds that information should be spread evenly throughout an utterance. Here, we ask whether a pressure for UID may have influenced word order patterns cross-linguistically. To this end, we use computational models to test whether real orders lead to greater information uniformity than counterfactual orders. In our empirical study of 10 typologically diverse languages, we find that: (i) among SVO languages, real word orders consistently have greater uniformity than reverse word orders, and (ii) only linguistically implausible counterfactual orders consistently exceed the uniformity of real orders. These findings are compatible with a pressure for information uniformity in the development and usage of natural languages.1

Lexical, Morphological, and Syntactic Aspects of Verb Production in Agrammatic Aphasics

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT) and make more mistakes in producing non-canonical sentences compared to that of canonical sentences. The present research investigates the production impairments of canonical and non-canonical sentences cross-linguistically focusing on Bangla, Japanese, German and English aphasic patients. While Bangla, Japanese, German have relatively flexible word order, and hence allow freer phrasal movement, English exemplifies less freedom in word order patterns, and does not allow as much movement as the former three. We hypothesized that Bangla agrammatic patients would have more impairments in producing non-canonical sentences than those of canonical counterparts, while the production of canonical sentences is not completely devoid of impairments too. Primary data were collected from Bangla agrammatic patients, and secondary data from Japanese, German and English were exploited for cross-linguistic comparison. The findings show that Bangla agrammatic speakers have severe impairments in producing passive sentences, although the production of active ones are not completely devoid of impairments. The cross-linguistic comparison of the findings implies that the production of Bangla agrammatism tend to be similar to other agrammatic production and the production of non-canonical sentences are more difficult than those of canonical sentences cross-linguistically.