Production and processing of time reference in Moroccan Arabic agrammatism: evidence from a semitic language

ABSTRACT

Background

Several studies on agrammatic aphasia have suggested a selective deficit in the production and processing of temporal reference to the past. To account for this pattern of performance, the PAst DIscourse LIinking Hypothesis was formulated (PADILIH). The PADILIH assumes an impairment of discourse-linking operations in agrammatic aphasia, which manifests in greater difficulty with reference to the past than to the present and future, which do not rely on D-linking.

Aims

The first goal of the present study was to examine the validity of the PADILIH, drawing evidence from a morphologically rich Semitic language; Moroccan Arabic (MA). The second goal was to examine whether different experimental manipulations will yield different patterns of performance; hence, suggesting an interaction between task demands and accuracy.

Methods & Procedures

Five MA agrammatic participants and five non-brain-damaged participants (NBDs) took part in the present study. Production, processing, and comprehension of temporal reference were tested using a number of experimental tasks. For production, a picture description, and a transformational sentence completion were used. For processing, a grammaticality-judgment task was used. For comprehension, a sentence-picture matching task was used.

Outcomes & Results

NBDs performed at ceiling across all the tasks used. For agrammatic participants, different tasks revealed different patterns of performance. Both findings of the transformational sentence completion and the grammaticality-judgment tasks support the predictions of the PADILIH, in the sense that, at the group level, past reference was more compromised than present and future reference. Picture description data, however, suggested a tendency to supply more verbs in the past form. Comprehension data suggested asymmetries between the present and the future.

Conclusion

Sentence completion and grammaticality-judgment data provide cross-linguistic support for the PADILIH. To explain the findings of the picture description task, it was proposed that the high number of verbs supplied in the past reflects an economy-of-effort strategy whereby patients omitted present and future markers to avoid cognitive overload. To account for the findings of the comprehension task, it was suggested that the fact that the action denoted by the verb is not overtly displayed in pictures referring to past and future contexts, but rather inferred from the contextual clues, might have given rise to a future deficit as well. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporal reference
• agrammatic aphasia
• Moroccan Arabic
• production
• comprehension
• past

Acknowledgments

I would like to express gratitude to all the participants who took part in the present study, and to the head of the Neurology Unit at the University Medical Center, CHU Hassan II, Dr./Pr. M.F. Belahsen, as well, for linking me with patients. Special thanks are extended to Pr. A. Ech-charfi, head of the Applied Linguistics’ research program at the Faculty of Education, for all the comments and suggestions. Sincere thanks extend to Pr./Dr. W. Kojmane from the department of paediatrics, and Miss. Hassna from the Physical Rehabilitation centre, for support and insights.

Disclosure statement

The author declares no conflict of interest.