Tense and agreement in German agrammatism

Area of Science:

• Linguistics
• Neuroscience
• Psychology

Background:

• Agrammatic aphasia is a language disorder characterized by difficulties in producing grammatically correct speech.
• Understanding the specific linguistic deficits in aphasia is crucial for diagnosis and treatment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the dissociation between tense marking and subject-verb agreement in German-speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia.
• To propose a neurolinguistic account for the observed deficits.

Main Methods:

• Sentence-completion and grammaticality-judgment tasks were administered.
• Seven German-speaking agrammatic aphasics and seven age-matched controls participated.

Main Results:

• Aphasic participants demonstrated high accuracy in subject-verb agreement.
• Tense marking was significantly impaired in the aphasic group compared to controls.

Conclusions:

• The findings support a tense-defective T(ense)/INFL(ection) functional category in agrammatic aphasia.
• This defect specifically impacts tense specification ([+/-Past]) while preserving agreement functions.