Selective tense and agreement impairment in Arabic

old_uid9370
titleSelective tense and agreement impairment in Arabic
start_date2010/12/06
schedule14h30-16h30
onlineno
location_infordc, salle de conférences
summaryCase studies in Hebrew and Arabic showed that tense inflection was harder than agreement inflection for agrammatic patients in oral production (Friedmann & Grodzinsky 1997; Friedmann 2001; Tissen et al. 2007). Recent studies revealed that this dissociation was found in both oral production and grammaticality judgment in various languages, including German (Wenzlaff & Clahsen 2004), Greek (Varlokosta et al. 2006), Moroccan Arabic (Diouny 2007), Dutch (Kok et al. 2007), and English (Clahsen & Ali 2009). We report results from an Arabic-speaking fluent aphasic whose performance on sentence completion (oral production) and grammaticality judgment tasks displays impairment with verbal inflections. We found that the patient was significantly more impaired in tense/aspect than agreement in production, with the opposite pattern in grammaticality judgment. This double dissociation supports our proposal that tense and agreement can be independently impaired, not only across agrammatic patients (Burchert et al. 2005), but also across tasks/modalities within a single patient. Our results pose a serious challenge to Friedmann & Grodzinsky’s (1997) and Lee’s (2003) purely representational/structural ‘Tree-Pruning’ accounts of Tense/Agreement dissociation in agrammatism, and to both Wenzlaff & Clahsen’s (2004) and Burchert et al.’s (2005) Underspecification accounts.
responsiblesCopley