A Secondary Analysis of Time Reference in the Discourse of Persian-Speaking Individuals with Fluent and Non-Fluent...

According to the Past Discourse Linking Hypothesis (PADILIH), people with agrammatic aphasia have difficulty referring to the past tense. Yet, the account is challenged by task-dependent arguments, i.e., unlike spontaneous speech tasks, structured tests require predictable answers from people with aphasia (PWA), keeping them far from free retrieval of tense forms. The current study was aimed at examining time reference in the discourse of fluent and non-fluent Persian-speaking PWAs using secondary data.

We used the transcribed discourse samples of Alipour et al.'s (2024) study, which were elicited through a picture description task, open-ended questions, and narrative speech of their PWA and non-brain-damaged (NBD) participants. We counted the present imperfect (or present), past tense, simple past, past perfect, past imperfect, present perfect and future imperfect (or future). Time reference categories were compared between and within groups. PWA tense/aspect errors were evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively.

The fluent group used the past imperfect more than NBDs; NBDs used the present and imperfect aspect more than the fluent group (p < 0.01). NBDs used the present imperfect, simple past, present perfect, future imperfect, past tense, perfect aspect and imperfect aspect more than the non-fluent group (p < 001). Both PWA groups made errors in referring to past, present and future tenses, but in most cases were able to use the appropriate time reference.

The presence of a deficit in past tense marking was not confirmed in the present study. The finding does not support PADILIH; yet, further research is needed across tasks and languages.