A Multimodal Study on Aspect Markers by Mandarin Chinese Individuals With Broca's Aphasia

Studies on the grammatical aspect of Mandarin Chinese individuals with aphasia (IWA) remain underexplored. In Chinese, the aspectual system serves to mark event boundaries, which are cognitively reflected through event segmentation. Overall, a disparity exists between linguistic/clinical research and cognitive research in this domain.

This study aims to assess potential deficits in the production and comprehension of perfective and imperfective aspect markers in Mandarin Chinese IWAs relative to healthy controls through video-based tasks. Additionally, we examined whether Mandarin Chinese IWAs exhibit an asymmetry between perfective and imperfective aspect. Finally, we explored IWA's event boundary decisions for a potential relationship between their linguistic and cognitive abilities.

Thirteen Mandarin Chinese IWA (age 55.23 ± 10.2; six females), and 30 age-matched healthy controls (age 55.26 ± 8.5, 18 females) participated in three video-based multimodal tasks. We assessed the comprehension and production of verbal aspect markers using a sentence production task, a sentence-video rating task, and an event-boundary location task.

Relative to the healthy controls, we found that the IWA group showed an impaired ability to produce perfective and imperfective aspect markers, with greater impairment at perfective than imperfective aspect. In a sentence/video matching task, the IWA group rated sentences with perfective and imperfective aspect markers lower than controls, but with no difference between perfective and imperfective aspect. However, the IWA group was not impaired at marking event boundaries in the event segmentation task.

The observed asymmetry between perfective and imperfective aspect supports the Past Discourse Linking Hypothesis and underscores the need for assessment and intervention frameworks that integrate grammatical deficits with discourse-level processing demands.

What is already known on the subject It has been extensively documented that individuals with aphasia (IWA) struggle with verb inflections, whereas grammatical aspect in Mandarin Chinese is still understudied in IWA. Aspectual markers (e.g., perfective/imperfective) linguistically encode event boundaries (e.g., completed, progressive), which mirror cognitive processes like event segmentation. The relationship between linguistic and cognitive abilities in this domain remain underexplored. What this paper adds to the existing knowledge Our study found that Mandarin Chinese IWA showed larger impairment for perfective than imperfective markers. Although the IWA showed no significant difficulty in determining event boundaries (i.e., judging event completion), they were less confident than controls in associating completed events with perfective temporal marking in comprehension. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Our findings indicate the necessity of bridging cognitive theories, discourse pragmatic hypotheses, and linguistic features specific to Mandarin Chinese. Our findings also underscore the need for multifaceted models of aphasia that account for how language-specific structures interact with domain-general cognitive processes.

We examined comprehension and production of perfective and imperfective verb aspect. We explored the cognitive capacities in segmenting event boundedness in Chinese IWA. We found greater impairment at perfective than imperfective aspect in the production. The IWA rated sentences with perfective/imperfective markers lower than controls. The IWA showed no impairment at marking event boundaries.