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Exploring grammatical aspect impairment in French-speaking people with aphasia: insight from different tasks and cognitive predictors
Poster Session C, Friday, October 25, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Natacha Cordonier1, Marion Fossard1; 1University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Introduction. Verbal inflection is often impaired in people with aphasia (PWA), with aspect – expressing event completeness – particularly vulnerable (e.g., Fyndanis et al., 2012). Surprisingly, aspect remains underexplored in this population, with limited investigation beyond the Greek and Russian languages and inconsistent findings (Dragoy & Bastiaanse, 2013; Fyndanis & Themistocleous, 2019). Factors that may contribute to this inconsistency include language specificities, the conflation of tense and aspect within tasks, and the use of different tasks that potentially engage distinct cognitive processes (Fyndanis & Themistocleous, 2019; Nanousi et al., 2006). Therefore, the present study aimed to clarify aspect impairment in French-speaking PWA across different tasks, taking into account underlying cognitive mechanisms. Methods. Twenty-one French-speaking participants with fluent and non-fluent aphasia and twenty-one matched healthy controls (HC) completed three tasks manipulating aspect (perfective for a completed event versus imperfective for an ongoing event) while maintaining stable tense (past tense). Task 1 (T1) required producing inflected verbal forms in a perfective or imperfective past tense according to a temporal adverb (e.g., "Eat - Last Monday, the boy___in ten minutes" - expected: ate). Task 2 (T2) included a first source sentence with an aspectual frame differing from that presented in a subsequent gap sentence (e.g., "In two weeks, the girl has read stories once. Write - For the past month, she____ poems every day" - expected: wrote). Task 3 (T3) involved completing gap sentences with a specified aspectual frame, using forced-choice temporal adverbs (e.g., "___, the boy walked until noon"; forced choices: last Tuesday or every Tuesday). Participants also underwent standardized tests assessing verbal and nonverbal working memory, flexibility, and inhibition. Generalized linear mixed models analyzed performance on each task, with groups (PWA, HC) as a fixed effect, and for PWA performance, aspect (perfective, imperfective) and cognitive variables as fixed effects. Results. Likelihood ratio tests revealed group effects in all three tasks, with poorer performance in PWA (T1: χ2(1) = 46.14, p < .001; T2: χ2(1) = 14.63, p < .001; T3: χ2(1) = 18.01, p < .001). Among PWA, an aspect effect, with poorer performance for the imperfective, was found only in T1 (χ2(1) = 5.34, p < .03). Results for the cognitive predictors showed a significant effect of working memory on T1 (χ2(1) = 6.08, p < .02), inhibition on T2 (χ2(1) = 3.92, p < .05), and a marginally significant effect of nonverbal working memory on T3 (χ2(1) = 3.32, p = .069). Discussion. Our results confirm aspect impairment in PWA (e.g., Dragoy & Bastiaanse, 2013) and extend it to French for the first time. They also reconcile previous findings, suggesting that tasks assessing aspect may involve different cognitive processes, such as the inhibition of a previous aspectual frame or the involvement of nonverbal working memory in forced-choice tasks. Notably, the aspect effect was observed only in T1, which was associated with working memory. This suggests that tasks that sufficiently tax verbal working memory are more likely to reveal an aspect effect, as demonstrated for tense (Cordonier et al., 2024).
Topic Areas: Disorders: Acquired, Morphology