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Morphosyntactic aspects of agrammatism in Palestinian Arabic: Findings from a Semitic language

Summary

Agrammatism, a grammar-production deficit typical of Broca's aphasia, had been studied only thinly in Palestinian Arabic (PA). Earlier cross-linguistic work included just two PA speakers. This study examines the morphosyntax of spontaneous speech from eight PA speakers with agrammatism and eight healthy controls matched for age and gender. Patients were diagnosed with the Arabic (Jordanian) version of the Bilingual Aphasia Test. Each person talked freely about everyday personal topics. The first 100 words of each sample were transcribed and coded for omissions and substitutions of tense, agreement, article and preposition morphology. Because the groups were small, the author used nonparametric statistics.

The patients made clearly more tense errors than agreement errors. They dropped the Arabic definite article and prepositions far more often than they swapped them. They also handled concrete spatial prepositions better than abstract ones. These results match earlier findings for Hebrew and Jordanian Arabic and support the zero-morphology account. They also show that a language's own morphology shapes which elements are lost. The work fills a gap for a Semitic variety and gives clinicians concrete markers for diagnosis.

Key points

  • Participants: 8 PA speakers with agrammatism (6 male, 2 female, aged 47–70, at least six months after a single left-hemisphere lesion) and 8 matched controls. Recordings were made at the Bethlehem Arab Society for Rehabilitation and the Al-Nour Center in Kuwait.
  • Severity was rated from BAT subtests: 2 severe, 4 moderate and 2 mild. Apraxia of speech and dysarthria were ruled out.
  • Sample: the first 100 words (about 10 utterances) per speaker. A second rater re-analysed a random 25% of transcripts, giving segmentation reliability of 0.91.
  • Statistics: the Mann-Whitney U test compared groups and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test compared error types within a group. Tense errors were higher in patients than controls (Z = −3.17, p < .01). Within the patient group, agreement was significantly better preserved than tense.
  • Preposition outcomes for the patients: 56.43% omitted, 31.57% substituted and 12.29% correct. The definite article was mostly omitted, and no errors in morpheme order were found.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The paper codes every error as either a dropped element or a wrong element of the same category, because the two point to different underlying failures. — For Mova (learn): Self-induced repair rules could keep "missing token" and "wrong token" as separate error classes, so each gets its own targeted fix and its own evaluation count.
  • I2. Elements that carry little information, such as the unmarked Arabic article, are the first to disappear, while richly marked ones survive. Low-load function words can therefore be predicted as the likeliest gaps. — For Mova (tree): When parsing telegraphic or noisy English, the parser could try inserting a missing determiner, preposition or copula before attaching dependents, ranking candidates by how little meaning they carry.
  • I3. Tense and agreement are scored separately rather than as one "verb inflection" score, which exposes a dissociation that a combined score would hide. — For Mova (tokens): The tagger and morphology evaluation should report accuracy separately for each feature (Tense, Number, Person), so that a weak feature is not masked by an averaged figure.
  • I4. Concrete spatial prepositions were kept while abstract uses were lost, which suggests that literal and figurative senses of the same word behave differently. — For Mova (frames): Role assignment could tag each preposition as spatial or abstract and test the two classes separately, since abstract readings are more likely to need a different frame.
  • I5. The study controls sample length by taking a fixed first-N-word window per speaker, double-codes a random quarter of the data, and uses paired nonparametric tests because the sample is small. — For Mova (learn): The same design suits small human-checked evaluation sets: use fixed-size slices, a second annotator on a random subset to measure agreement, and Wilcoxon tests when comparing two parser versions on the same items.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.5209/rlog.85225

@inproceedings{adam2023morphosyntactic,
  title = {{Morphosyntactic aspects of agrammatism in Palestinian Arabic: Findings from a Semitic language}},
  author = {Adam, Hisham},
  booktitle = {Revista de Investigación en Logopedia 13},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.5209/rlog.85225},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.5209/rlog.85225}
}

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