Selective Impairment of Verb Tense in MazandaraniSpeaking Agrammatic Patients

Abstract

Introduction: Among many grammatical problems affecting agrammatic patients, those of inflectional morphology, specifically tense, stand at the forefront. This study aimed to analyze tense properties in Mazandarani-speaking Broca patients to see which aspects of this inflectional system were more negatively affected.

Materials and Methods: Utilizing inclusion/exclusion criteria, we chose 10 patients (mean age 47 years) in this descriptive-analytical research. To select our participants, some criteria including the results of the Persian aphasia test, monolingualism, and magnetic resonance imaging reports were considered which corroborated the involvement of the anterior frontal lobe, inferior anterior parietal lobe, Perisylvian, and Broca’s areas as well as inferior frontal gyrus. To monitor our patients’ performance in three separate tenses of present (progressive), future, and past (simple past, past perfect, and past continuous), we administered written sentence completion and sentence-to-picture matching tests. To investigate whether our patients’ performance in diverse verb tenses was significantly different, we utilized Wilcoxon statistics to analyze our data.

Results: The results demonstrated a significant difference between the performance of the patients in past progressive tense compared to other tenses (P=0.02). Furthermore, a significant difference was observed between the mean responses to past tenses and present-future tenses.

Conclusion: Mazandarani-speaking agrammatic demonstrated selective poor performance in the past tense inflection. Regarding the crucial role of tense properties in verbal communication, specifically past tense, to talk about past events and memories, more attention is needed by clinicians and speech therapists to reinforce tense properties enhancing agrammatic communication capabilities.