Agrammatism in French and German : the challenges of a cross linguistic study.

This poster first presents a dissertation project consisting of a cross-linguistic study of the selection of the verbal mood and complement clauses in the syndrome of agrammatism, a language deficit principally observed in individuals with Broca's aphasia, in German and French. As the verbal mood and complement clauses are directly related to two main symptoms of agrammatism, namely impaired processing of the verbal inflection and quantitative and qualitative reduction of syntactic structures (Pillon, 2001; Thompson & Bastiaanse, 2012), it seems appropriate to analyse these two linguistic elements in agrammatism from a cross-linguistic as well as a cross-modal perspective. Indeed, there is still a lack of cross-linguistic studies on agrammatism in the literature (Beveridge & Bak, 2011, Thompson & Bastiaanse, 2012). Furthermore, the question of the cross-modal (or central) nature of the agrammatism disorder is still unresolved (Faroqi-Shah & Dickey, 2009) and has not yet been addressed cross-linguistically from the perspective of the verbal mood and complement clauses. The second issue discussed in this poster focuses on the challenges encountered during the design process of the experimental study currently under development that such a cross-linguistic and cross-modal study brings to light. These challenges are intrinsically imposed by the heterogeneity of the agrammatic impairment, the cross-linguistic nature of the study and the linguistic structures selected for the investigation, among other things. The ultimate goal of this poster is to obtain feedback and to exchange with other researchers on the project and the experimental design.