Treatment of verb tense inflection and sentence production in Persian individuals with agrammatism

Abstract

Production of verb morphology, especially tense inflection, is usually impaired in individuals with agrammatism. There have been relatively few studies on treatment of verb tense inflection in agrammatic aphasia. In this study we adapted ACTION (a linguistically motivated treatment) to Persian language, to treat the production of regular and irregular verbs separately in sentence context. A single-subject multiple-baseline across behaviors design was used to establish the treatment effect. Using a non-probable convenience sampling, four Persian agrammatic patients with Broca’s aphasia resulting from cerebrovascular accident (CVA) were recruited for this study. Two participants received treatment first for regular verbs (Phase 1, 4 weeks), and then for irregular verbs (Phase 2, 4 weeks). The other two participants received treatment in reverse order. In the final phase of treatment (Phase 3, 4 weeks), all 4 participants underwent a sentence construction treatment. All participants showed improvement in the production of trained tenses. Treatment also generalized to production of untrained regular verbs while generalization to irregular verbs was modest. Furthermore, improvement was found on narrative scores (e.g. MLU) after treatment. These findings suggest that Persian individuals with agrammatism could be trained to correctly apply temporal information to verb inflection in elicited speech.

Keywords:

• Aphasia therapy
• agrammatism
• morphology
• tense inflection
• verb

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the aphasic participants and their caregivers, without whom this study would have been impossible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by Tehran University of Medical Sciences [IR.TUMS.FNM.REC.1398.145].