Processing of time reference in agrammatic speakers of Akan: a language with grammatical tone

Tsiwah, Frank; Lartey, Nathaniel; Amponsah, Clement; Martínez-Ferreiro, Silvia; Popov, Srđan; Bastiaanse, Roelien

doi:10.1080/02687038.2020.1727835

Cited by 14 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…In comprehension, however, the agrammatic speakers encountered difficulty comprehending future time reference in both Spanish and Catalan. Koukoulioti and Bastiaanse (2020) also found a similar pattern concerning reference to the past but also suggested difficulties with the future in Greek agrammatic participants (see also Rofes et al (2014) for Catalan; and for comprehension, Tsiwah et al (2020) for Akan).…”

Section: Discourse Linking Time Reference and The Padilihmentioning

confidence: 56%

An investigation of time reference in production and comprehension in Thai speakers with agrammatic aphasia

2020

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Background: It has been demonstrated that reference to the past is difficult for individuals with agrammatic aphasia, leading to the formulation of the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH). Many of the previous studies have focused on Indo-European languages, in which time reference is expressed through verb inflection. The current study examined the PADILIH in Thai, a language that does not use verb inflection but instead uses aspectual markers to refer to time. Aims: We aimed to evaluate the pattern of impairment of time reference in Thai speakers with agrammatic aphasia, by investigating how grammatical reference to past, present, and future was processed. Methods and Procedures: A total of 15 Thai agrammatic speakers and 18 Thai non-brain-damaged (NBD) speakers participated in a sentence production task and an auditory sentence-to-picture matching comprehension task, both of which probed past, present, and future time reference. Outcomes and Results: While the NBD participants performed close to ceiling in both production and comprehension, the agrammatic speakers showed significantly more difficulty in conditions requiring reference to the future in both modalities. In production, however, the agrammatic speakers replaced the target future time reference construction with negation (a construction that can be used as an alternative means for future reference). When responses using negation were counted as correct, the individuals with agrammatic aphasia showed equal impairment across conditions. Conclusions: The results of this study were inconsistent with the PADILIH predictions: Thai agrammatic speakers experienced more vulnerability in reference to the future than the present and the past. This suggested that impairments of time reference may differ depending on the structure of the language. We hypothesized that the problems with producing future time reference in Thai may be influenced by the grammatical status of the future marker. In addition, the use of negation in place of the target word might have been because this negative construction reduces the processing load for Thai agrammatic speakers.

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Section: Discourse Linking Time Reference and The Padilihmentioning

confidence: 56%

An investigation of time reference in production and comprehension in Thai speakers with agrammatic aphasia

2020

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“…The present study included two clinical groups and ten non-brain damaged (NBD) participants. The clinical groups consisted of six individuals with LHD and agrammatic aphasia (see Tsiwah et al, 2020 for the diagnosis criteria) and six individuals with RHD and no aphasia. The individuals with LHD were four males and two females, with a mean age of 52 (range: 19 -76, SD = 16.9) years, while the RHD group included 5 males and 1 female with a mean age of 53 (range: 34 -67, SD = 13.3) years.…”

Section: Participantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The materials and procedure used in Tsiwah et al's (2020) study were also used for the current study. For a more detailed description, see Tsiwah et al (2020).…”

Section: Materials and Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many studies on aphasia have shown that the processing of tense and aspect, which indicate the time reference of an event, are problematic for agrammatic individuals (Dutch: Bastiaanse, 2008 Nanousi et al, 2006). Further, recent studies have demonstrated that not all time frames are equally impaired in agrammatism, and that the time frame referring to the past is usually more susceptible to being impaired than the present and usually also than the future (Bastiaanse, 2013;Bos & Bastiaanse, 2014;Martínez-Ferreiro & Bastiaanse, 2013;Tsiwah et al, 2020). Moreover, reaction time studies on tense processing have shown that healthy adults show longer reaction times for time reference violations caused by a verb in past rather than present tense (Jonkers et al 2007;Faroqi-Shah & Dickey 2009).…”

Section: Tense Processingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Time, tone and the brain: Behavioral and neurophysiological studies on time reference and grammatical tone in Akan

Tsiwah¹

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How time flies! I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to God for being my light, wisdom, strength, and for all the guidance He extended to me through some great people during my entire doctoral training, as well as the completion of this book.The first of such great persons is my first supervisor and promoter, Prof. Dr. Roelien Bastiaanse. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to you for taking me on as a PhD student, for your vigorous scholarly inputs and continuous guidance, our shared joy in talking about my project, and your timely and lucid comments on my manuscripts, which brought this project to a timely completion. I deem it a privilege that we got along well both professionally and personally. Ik hoop dat ik ooit de juiste woorden kan vinden om mijn dankbaarheid te uiten voor wat je de afgelopen acht jaar voor me hebt gedaan en betekend hebt.I am very thankful to my co-supervisors Prof. Dr. Lyndsey Nickels and Dr. Srdjan Popov. Thank you, Lyndsey! Although you joined the supervisory team during the last year of my project, it always felt like you had been there since the beginning. Your positivity, guidance, thorough and timely feedback undoubtedly led to the successful completion of this thesis. My sincere gratitude goes to Srdjan for all that you taught me about EEG data pre-processing and analysis. You made me develop a strong interest in working on EEG data. Thanks for all your flexibility, advice, and the good relationship we have had over the years.

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“…Time reference has been shown to be affected in individuals with acquired language impairment, such as agrammatic aphasia (e.g., Bastiaanse et al, 2011;Bastiaanse, 2013). Critically, there are many different ways to refer to time; for instance, by morphological markers such as the -ed in English and other Indo-European languages, by the use of tone such as in Akan (Tsiwah et al, 2020), and by aspectual markers (the use of free-standing morphemes to indicate different time frames) such as in Thai, the focus of the current dissertation.…”

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Neurolinguistic Studies on the Linguistic Expression of Time Reference in Thai

Siriboonpipattana¹

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The concept of time is crucial in everyday communication. Temporal expressions help us to understand when things happen, relative to when we are speaking. For instance, the sentence Last night, Jimmy talked to his grandmother shows that the event took place in the past. If Last night was to be replaced by Tomorrow, the sentence becomes ungrammatical, because the new phrase does not match the time frame specified by the verb talk. Time reference has been shown to be affected in individuals with acquired language impairment, such as agrammatic aphasia (e.g., Bastiaanse et al., 2011;Bastiaanse, 2013). Critically, there are many different ways to refer to time; for instance, by morphological markers such as the -ed in English and other Indo-European languages, by the use of tone such as in Akan (Tsiwah et al., 2020), and by aspectual markers (the use of free-standing morphemes to indicate different time frames) such as in Thai, the focus of the current dissertation. INTRODUCTIONAphasia, in Greek 'ἄφατος (áphatos)' from 'ἀ-(a-, not)' and 'φάσις (phásis, speech)' meaning 'no speech', is an acquired language disorder that affects linguistic abilities: the ability to produce and to comprehend (also to read and to write). It is usually caused by left-lateralized brain damage commonly from strokes, brain tumors, head injuries or dementia. Language severity varies individually: to exemplify, for some individuals, it may affect the ability to retrieve words, while for others, it may affect the ability to construct grammatical sentences, or to understand certain types of sentence (e.g., passive sentences and object clefts). Whether the production or comprehension modalities are affected depends on the size and the lesion site of the brain damage (Grodzinsky, 1990).Aphasia is broadly distinguished based on the characteristics of verbal expressions into non-fluent and fluent types (e.g., Davis, 2007;Goodglass & Kaplan, 1972). The focus of this dissertation is on non-fluent aphasia; specifically, agrammatic aphasia. Agrammatic speech is traditionally characterized by non-fluent speech output, with relatively intact comprehension of single words. Menn and Obler (1990) noted that, cross-linguistically, speech rate and utterance length are means of measurement used to define agrammatism.Compared to non-brain damaged (NBD) speakers, individuals with agrammatic aphasia produce slower speech with more simplified grammatical structures. Their connected speech is reported to consist mainly of content words (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives), while function words and grammatical morphemes are often omitted and substituted (e.g., Goodglass & Kaplan, 1972). 'Sunee goes to the beach today.' 2. Sunee kub Suma pai talay wannee Sunee and Suma go beach today 'Sunee and Suma go to the beach today.' 3. Sunee kub Suma pai talay peekorn Sunee and Suma go beach year-last 'Sunee and Suma went to the beach last year.' 4. Sunee koei dern pai talay peekorn Sunee PERF walk go beach year-last 'Sunee used to go to the beach (by walking) last year.'To exempli...

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Processing of time reference in agrammatic speakers of Akan: a language with grammatical tone

Cited by 14 publications

References 51 publications

An investigation of time reference in production and comprehension in Thai speakers with agrammatic aphasia

An investigation of time reference in production and comprehension in Thai speakers with agrammatic aphasia

Time, tone and the brain: Behavioral and neurophysiological studies on time reference and grammatical tone in Akan

Neurolinguistic Studies on the Linguistic Expression of Time Reference in Thai

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