The Effect of Morphosemantic Treatment on Verb-Tense Inflection in Persian-Speaking Patients with Agrammatism: A Case Report

Abstract

Background: One of the relatively common symptoms in non-fluent aphasia is agrammatism. Agrammatism is characterized with low syntactic complexity and deficits in verb inflection, especially tense markers. Verbs as the main core of sentences in the Persian language have vital functions for people to have effective communication. Objectives: The current study aimed at evaluating the effect of morphosemantic method on verb-tense inflection in Persian-speaking patients with aphasia and agrammatism. Methods: Morphosemantic treatment was conducted in five stages in a case report study. The material was 46 black and white line-drawing pictures related to 23 verbs including 10 training, 10 expansion, and three exemplar verbs drawn in present and past tenses. In three phases, the percentage of correct verb inflection in the training and expansion verbs was measured and also the graph examination of level, slope of trend, and C statistic, 2-standard deviation band, effect size (percentage of non-overlapping data), and d statistic were used to analyze the data. Results: Both participants demonstrated significant changes in training and expansion verbs during therapeutic sessions in comparison with the baseline. The effect of therapy was maintained for a three-week follow-up. Conclusions: Therapy for verb inflection in spontaneous speech is clinically important. The current study demonstrated that morphosemantic method can be successfully used for tense marker deficits in Persian-speaking patients with aphasia and agrammatism.