Jan 11, 2025 08:45 AM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1070120
INTRO: An international team of researchers, including scientists from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, has identified the causes of impairments in expressing grammatical tense in people with aphasia. They discovered that individuals with speech disorders struggle with both forming the concept of time and selecting the correct verb tense. However, which of these processes proves more challenging depends on the speaker's language. The findings have been published in the journal Aphasiology.
Aphasia is a severe speech disorder, often resulting from a stroke, in which individuals lose the ability to speak coherently. In particular, this can manifest as incorrect use of verb tenses, making it difficult for patients to talk about past or future events, significantly complicating everyday communication.
To investigate the origins of these difficulties, researchers from universities in Russia, Greece, Italy, the US, and Norway conducted an experiment. They hypothesised that tense expression impairments could stem from two distinct processes: encoding and retrieval.
During encoding, a speaker forms the concept of time (for example, whether an action occurred in the past, present, or future). During retrieval, they select the correct verb form to express that concept.
To understand the impact of each process, the scientists carried out experiments with aphasia patients speaking four different languages: Greek, Russian, Italian, and English. These languages were chosen because they structure verb tenses differently, allowing the researchers to examine how language-specific features influence encoding and retrieval of tense in aphasia patients.
To aid in diagnosis, the researchers designed two sentence-completion tasks... (MORE - details, no ads)
INTRO: An international team of researchers, including scientists from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, has identified the causes of impairments in expressing grammatical tense in people with aphasia. They discovered that individuals with speech disorders struggle with both forming the concept of time and selecting the correct verb tense. However, which of these processes proves more challenging depends on the speaker's language. The findings have been published in the journal Aphasiology.
Aphasia is a severe speech disorder, often resulting from a stroke, in which individuals lose the ability to speak coherently. In particular, this can manifest as incorrect use of verb tenses, making it difficult for patients to talk about past or future events, significantly complicating everyday communication.
To investigate the origins of these difficulties, researchers from universities in Russia, Greece, Italy, the US, and Norway conducted an experiment. They hypothesised that tense expression impairments could stem from two distinct processes: encoding and retrieval.
During encoding, a speaker forms the concept of time (for example, whether an action occurred in the past, present, or future). During retrieval, they select the correct verb form to express that concept.
To understand the impact of each process, the scientists carried out experiments with aphasia patients speaking four different languages: Greek, Russian, Italian, and English. These languages were chosen because they structure verb tenses differently, allowing the researchers to examine how language-specific features influence encoding and retrieval of tense in aphasia patients.
To aid in diagnosis, the researchers designed two sentence-completion tasks... (MORE - details, no ads)