Verbal inflection in agrammatism: a contrastive study of German and French

This poster provides an overview of a research project on agrammatism in German and French. Agrammatism is defined as a syndrome associated with non-fluent aphasia speech disorder. It is characterized by (i) a breakdown of functional elements, (ii) a verbal processing impairment and, (iii) a reduction of length and complexity of syntactic structures (Thompson & Bastiaanse, 2012). Despite these attested recurrent manifestations, the greatest challenge regarding agrammatism is to account for the high symptom variability among patients but also across languages and modalities. Due to this variability, the very existence of agrammatism as a syndrome as such is a debated topic in aphasiology and linguistics (Penke, 1998, Pillon, 1987). In this context, crosslinguistic investigations of agrammatic impairment are essential (Beveridge & Bak, 2011, Thompson & Bastiaanse, 2012). So far, French and German have never been the starting point for a cross-linguistic analysis of agrammatism, although both languages show form-meaning similarities at morphosyntactic and syntactic levels. The present research aims to fill this gap by comparing different morphosyntactic constructions considered problematic in agrammatism in German and French. To this aim, seven psycholinguistic experimental tasks were designed. The poster first introduces the general research topic, with a focus on the definition of agrammatism, the crosslinguistic constructions under study, and the research questions. Second, the methodology used for this study, namely an experimental method, is explained. In this regard, special attention is given to the experimental tasks aiming to test verbal inflection, especially verbal temporal reference and conditional. These two factors have both crosslinguistic relevance and may be problematic for agrammatic people (see for instance Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2005, Bastiaanse, 2013). The production of temporal reference and conditional in verbs was tested with agrammatic people and control persons with three elicitation tasks. Then, the preliminary results of these tests comparing the production of agrammatic people in German and French are displayed. Whereas there are contrastive language-dependent tendencies as well as a high influence of inter-subject variability, similarities are also present across subjects and languages. These observations are briefly compared with existing linguistic hypotheses about agrammatism in the literature (for instance Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997, Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2005, Kok, Kolk, & Haverkort, 2006, Bastiaanse, 2013). Finally, the crosslinguistic relevance of these hypotheses is evaluated. Bastiaanse, R. (2013). Why reference to the past is difficult for agrammatic speakers. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 27(4), 244–263. Beveridge, M. E. L., & Bak, T. H. (2011). The languages of aphasia research: Bias and diversity. Aphasiology, 25(12), 1451–1468. Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397–425. Kok, P., Kolk, H., & Haverkort, M. (2006). Agrammatic sentence production: Is verb second impaired in Dutch? Brain and Language, 96(3), 243–254. Penke, M. (1998). Die Grammatik des Agrammatismus: Eine linguistische Untersuchung zu Wortstellung und Flexion bei Broca-Aphasie. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Pillon, A. (1987). L’agrammatisme dans tous ses états. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive, 7(4), 335–369. Thompson, C. K., & Bastiaanse, R. (2012). Introduction to agrammatism. In C. K. Thompson & R. Bastiaanse (Eds.), Perspectives on agrammatism (pp. 1–16). New-York/London: Psychology Press. Wenzlaff, M., & Clahsen, H. (2005). Finiteness and verb-second in German agrammatism. Brain and Language, 92(1), 33–44.