Once Upon a Time and Beyond: Time Reference in the Narratives of French Speakers With Fluent and Nonfluent Aphasia

Time reference is often impaired in people with aphasia (PWA), but most research has focused on verb tense production in sentence-level tasks. Few studies have examined how PWA manage time reference in discourse, particularly in fluent aphasia. This study thus investigated how people with fluent and nonfluent aphasia produce verb tenses in discourse and how task type influences performance. Additionally, we explored linguistic patterns associated with time reference in PWA, namely, reduced verb diversity and increased use of temporal adverbs.

We conducted a cross-sectional observational study with 21 PWA (11 nonfluent, 10 fluent) and 21 healthy controls. Participants completed two discourse tasks: a sequential picture description (past, present, and future frameworks) and a semistandardized interview (past and future frameworks). Verb tense production, verb diversity, and temporal adverbs were analyzed using generalized linear mixed models.

Both aphasia groups produced a comparable number of inflected verbs to control when controlling for word count, aligning with the expected temporal framework. Task effects were observed across all participants, with more present tense verbs in the interview and more future tense verbs in the picture description task, irrespective of the temporal framework. Regarding the linguistic patterns associated with time reference, individuals with nonfluent aphasia exhibited a trade-off effect in the past framework of the picture description task: higher verb diversity was associated with lower past-tense verb production. Conversely, individuals with fluent aphasia relied more on temporal adverbs.

The study demonstrates that both fluent and nonfluent aphasia impact discourse-level time reference, each with distinct associated linguistic patterns. It also highlights the need for task-specific assessments in clinical practice.

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.30329683.