Tense and Gender production in Arabic-Speaking Aphasics

Abstract

The current study aims at examining the tense and agreement patterns as produced by agrammatic Palestinian-Arabic speakers using sentence completion tasks. The participants were presented with two sentences and asked to work on them. The first sentence included an inflected verb for both tense and agreement. In the second sentence, the participants were requested to complete a missing verb, where the temporal adverb or the subject’s person, gender, or number was changed. The findings revealed that the agrammatic speakers showed a significant dissociation between tense and agreement, whereby tense was significantly more impaired compared to agreement inflections. Similar results are reported from other languages. The results provide further evidence of Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH) that functional categories associated with upper nodes in the syntactic tree are more impaired than functional categories associated with the lower nodes of the tree. The selective deficits of the morpho-syntactic structures suggest that specific morphemes should be targeted in therapy programs. Keywords: Palestinian Arabic (PA); Agrammatism; Aphasia; Tense and Gender; Tree Pruning.