Selective tense deficit in Hungarian agrammatic aphasia
Selective tense deficit in Hungarian agrammatic aphasia

Summary/Abstract: The selective deficit of tense processing has recently become one of the phenomena most often examined by aphasiologists. It has repeatedly been shown that agrammatic aphasics have serious problems with the agreement of the time adverb and the tense morpheme, as opposed to the intactness of subject-verb agreement.Nine Hungarian patients with agrammatic Broca’s aphasia and nine healthy speakers participated in a study of sentence grammaticality judgement. Experiment 1, designed to measure ability to detect morphosyntactic violations (subject-verb agreement), included 40 ill-formed sentences containing an error of number. Ability to detect morphosemantic violation was tested in Experiment 2 including 80 ungrammatical sentences, where there was an incongruence between the time expressed by a time adverb (today, yesterday, tomorrow) and the tense of the verb. Our results indicate that Hungarian agrammatic aphasics show a selective deficit of tense, and that the position of an adverb influences sentence processing. These findings are discussed in a syntax-discourse model, which accounts not only for the selective deficit of tense, but also for the differences in working memory load necessary for the processing of sentences containing either a pre-verbal or a post-verbal time adverb.

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