Investigating Grammatical Agreement, Tense, and Aspect in Two Kurdish-speaking Broca’s Patients

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Ph.D. Student of Linguistics Islamic Azad University, Ilam Branch, Ilam, Iran.

2 Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Islamic Azad University, Ilam Branch, Ilam, Iran

Abstract

The present study is intended to investigate inflection deficits in two Kurdish-speaking Broca’s aphasia patients. Three grammatical categories including grammatical agreement, tense, and aspect together with their subcategories will be gauged to find the patterns in the speech of the patients. Natural conversations collected through voice-recordings and sentence completion tasks are employed to collect data. Friedmann & Grodzinsky (1997) is adopted as theoretical framework. The present study can be classified as a cross-sectional case study in which the data are collected from two Kurdish-speaking Broca’s aphasia patients. The results indicated that there was no task effect observed in this study; the two patients in the two tasks showed the least deficits in grammatical agreement and the most deficits in grammatical aspect. This finding is in line with Freidmann and Grodzinsky’s structural and hierarchical account of functional categories entitled Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH), although some minor findings of this study such as object agreement can be challenging for this account.

Keywords

References

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Research in Western Iranian Languages and Dialects
Volume 3, Issue 13
August 2016
Pages 61-81

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