omid azad

Halliday’s cohesive theory is one of the most important theories in functional linguistics, extensively used for the analysis of diverse literary texts. Based on this theory, logical, semantic, grammatical as well as formal relationships create cohesion in a text; hence, textual cohesion is classified into grammatical, lexical and connective subcategories. Grammatical cohesion includes reference, substitution and ellipsis while two subcategories of reiteration and collocation shapes lexical cohesion. Sa'di's verbal art is so enriched that meaning is not sacrificed for the sake of form, nor is form sacrificed for the sake of meaning. The poet's dexterity in the Persian literature's lexical and grammatical subtleties, and appropriate and skillful use of literary devices has made his poetry distinctive. In this descriptive-analytical research, adopting Halliday's theory of cohesion, one verse anecdote from the Būstān (The Fox and the Dervish) is selected to analyze the use of cohesive devices across three linguistic layers. Although cohesion in Sa'di's ghazals has been widely acknowledged, the reasons behind the cohesive strength of the verse anecdotes in the Būstān have not been thoroughly examined from a systemic functional perspective. Hence, the main research question was how lexical, grammatical and connective devices were employed in Sa'di's poetry, and which device was emphasized the most. The results corroborated the extensive and diverse use of cohesive devices in the verse anecdotes, in which the use of lexical cohesive devices is most outstanding. Among the grammatical devices, the poet puts more emphasis upon reference and ellipsis respectively. Furthermore, the poet's dexterous use of lexical cohesive devices, particularly repetition and its various forms on one hand, and collocation on the other hand, enhanced the beauty of the poet's expression, aiding its impact and facilitating better meaning transfer, so that form serves the purpose of meaning.  Among cohesive connective, additive and causative were the most prominent linguistic elements. This conclusion is in accordance with the characteristics of Sa'di's poetry as simplicity, lexical beauty, and fluency are outstanding features of this version of Iraqi style. Therefore, from a practical perspective, Halliday's theory is considered an appropriate framework for identifying cohesive devices in the prestigious poetic and prose texts of Persian literature, such as the Būstān. Based on the way cohesive devices are employed by various poets and literary figures, one may be able to understand, from the perspective of meaning, the organization of their thoughts and the originality of their ideas, and from the perspective of form, the unique verbal and rhetorical styles of each poet.

Among many grammatical problems affecting agrammatic patients, those of inflectional morphology, specifically tense, stand at the forefront. This study aimed to analyze tense properties in Mazandarani-speaking Broca patients to see which aspects of this inflectional system were more negatively affected.

Utilizing inclusion/exclusion criteria, we chose 10 patients (mean age 47 years) in this descriptive-analytical research. To select our participants, some criteria including the results of the Persian aphasia test, monolingualism, and magnetic resonance imaging reports were considered which corroborated the involvement of the anterior frontal lobe, inferior anterior parietal lobe, Perisylvian, and Broca’s areas as well as inferior frontal gyrus. To monitor our patients’ performance in three separate tenses of present (progressive), future, and past (simple past, past perfect, and past continuous), we administered written sentence completion and sentence-to-picture matching tests. To investigate whether our patients’ performance in diverse verb tenses was significantly different, we utilized Wilcoxon statistics to analyze our data.

The results demonstrated a significant difference between the performance of the patients in past progressive tense compared to other tenses (P=0.02). Furthermore, a significant difference was observed between the mean responses to past tenses and present-future tenses.

Mazandarani-speaking agrammatic demonstrated selective poor performance in the past tense inflection. Regarding the crucial role of tense properties in verbal communication, specifically past tense, to talk about past events and memories, more attention is needed by clinicians and speech therapists to reinforce tense properties enhancing agrammatic communication capabilities.

Broca and Wernicke’s patients perform satisfactorily regarding the processing of canonical syntactic structures, as maintained by previous studies; however, there has been a gap in the literature because no particular research has yet investigated the performance of these patients in the Persian circumstances once they were required to analyze sentences which would demand extra-semantic processing. This study clarifies the role of two critical semantic operations demanding extra-semantic processing at the sentential level: Aspectual coercion. It complements to provide some evidence on the localist view of the brain. Our rationale for selecting these operations was their pure semantic nature, not relying on morphosyntactic properties.

Having recruited two age- and education-matched Broca, two Wernicke, and four healthy controls, we conducted a semantic judgment task in which the participants were asked to express their correct semantic judgment in the two coercion and two normal conditions.

Our results showed an approximately above-chance performance of the Broca group for all conditions; however, in the Wernicke group, the same result was not observed due to their poor performance in coercion conditions, though in ordinary sentences, they performed much better.

Our findings, along with similar off-line and imaging studies, corroborate the view of localism, based on which Wernicke’s area is mainly responsible for the primary semantic operations while Broca’s area predominantly takes over syntactic parsing.

Language deficit is regarded as one of the most important hallmarks of primary progressive aphasia. This study aims to analyze the nature of verbal repetition ability in a group of patients suffering from the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia and investigate their cognitive capability.

In this cross-sectional study, 12 patients of the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia and 12 healthy individuals accomplished a set of tasks, including naming, word comprehension, digit span, repetition of multisyllabic single words, monosyllabic word span under similar or dissimilar phonological conditions, and sentence repetition.

The patients exhibited some degree of impairment with diverse patterns in each task, although the accomplishment of the sentence repetition task was the most challenging activity for the primary progressive aphasic patients of the semantic variant. However, the healthy individuals performed well in all tasks.

The recognition of the quantity and quality of the cognitive deficit in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasics can illuminate the nature of this disease and contribute to a better diagnosis of this disease. Furthermore, it can assist speech therapists and neuropsychologist to recruit appropriate therapies and employ better techniques for the diagnosis and cure of these patients.

The production of figurative expressions, particularly idioms, and proverbs, is negatively affected by damage to the left hemisphere and subcortical area of the brain. Alzheimer patients, thanks to the preservation of basal ganglia, can produce these expressions. In contrast, compared to Alzheimer’s patients, Parkinson’s patients cannot produce these expressions due to the malfunction of the basal ganglia. This study attempts to compare the linguistic and cognitive performance of Persian-speaking patients with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and healthy counterparts regarding the production and comprehension of these figurative expressions.

In doing so, by selecting a sample of participants composed of 10 Alzheimer’s patients, 10 Parkinson’s patients, and 10 healthy individuals matched with each other regarding age and education. Then, different tests, including Arizona battery for communication disorders of dementia, famous names, and face test, structured conversation, figurative expression completion, elicitation of response based on situational context, Northridge evaluation of idioms and proverbs in situational context, conventional and figurative expression evaluation were condcuted to analyze their performance.

The results of Arizona battery for communication disorders of dementia indicated that Alzheimer’s patients were in the middle stage of the disease while Parkinson’s participants were classified as non-dementia patients. Although the result of the Renown face and name recognition test demonstrated a significant difference between Alzheimer’s patients and the healthy group regarding cognition and confidence levels, the same result was not observed between healthy control and Alzheimer’s patients. Furthermore, in the test of structured conversation, the proportion of produced words by Alzheimer’s patients was more than that of Parkinson’s patients. However, the results of sentence and figurative expression completion tests corroborated the weaker performance of Alzheimer’s patients compared to their Parkinson and healthy counterparts. Furthermore, notwithstanding in the test of Elicitation of response based on Situational Context, Parkinson’s patients performed more poorly than their Alzheimer and healthy counterparts, in the tests of conventional and figurative expression evaluation, Alzheimer’s patients’ pattern of performance was different from that of other groups as they performed more weakly than Parkinson patients.

The observed dissociation in the performance of Alzheimer as well as Parkinson’s patients in the linguistic production and comprehension tests shed light on the significant role of the subcortical area of the brain in the production of idioms and proverbs.

The study of the relationship between bilingualism and the possible impact it might have on the control aspect of intelligence of adults in general and preschool children, in particular, has always been the subject of controversy for researchers. This research, following the related findings and gaps in the literature and inspired by Craik and Bialystok’s (2005) framework, tries to divulge whether bilingualism could be related to the control aspect of intelligence. As our secondary goal, we also tried to see whether there are correlations between different tests assessing control. 

In this descriptive correlational study, via the convenience sampling method, we selected our participants.

In doing so, 10 age-gender-matched Mazandarani-speaking monolinguals and the same matched bilinguals have been selected. Moreover, the literacy and socioeconomic status of subjects have been controlled. The tests for assessing subjects’ executive control included day-night Stroop, the dimensional change card sort (DCCS), test of variables of attention (TOVA), and the computerized attention network test (ANT). Our participants' performance in language proficiency task as well as control tasks was demonstrated. Furthermore, via the conduction of the Pearson correlation statistics, the relationships between the participants' performance in diverse control tasks and language task were investigated. 

The results showed that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in all control tests except DCCS. 

Bilingualism could provide children with an executive control advantage promoting them in tasks demanding thought and action control.

Fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis and canonicity were scrutinized in Persian-speaking aphasics. 

To this end, the performance of four age-, education-, and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca's patients and eight matched healthy controls in diverse complex structures were compared via the conduction of two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality judgment.

The tested structures included subject agentive, agentive passive, object experience, subject experience, subject cleft, and object cleft constructions. Our results, while corroborating the predictions of the mapping hypothesis, showed that in structures, in which linguistic elements were substituted and dislocated out of their canonical syntactic positions, namely, agentive passive, subject experiencer, object experiencer, and object cleft constructions, Broca’s problems escalated. In contrast, in those structures whose constituent concatenations were aligned with canonical syntactic structures, namely subject agentive, and cleft structures, patients had above the chance performance. Ultimately, the theoretical and clinical implications of the study were discussed. 

The number of predicates in a sentence, predicate types (psychological and agentive), as well as semantic heuristics and canonicity all by all could be regarded as the major culprits for aphasics' poor performance.

Many studies have suggested a relationship between coherence and cognitive processes. This study aims to investigate this hypothesis by assessing the relationship between cognitive variables and coherence in the discourse of 2 groups of Persian-speaking young adults and the elderly.

To evaluate our participants’ cognitive capabilities, we employed the cognitive tests of the mini-mental status test, the Stroop-color task, the digit symbol copy task, the clock-drawing task, and the backward digit span. On the other hand, the specific tasks to evaluate the discourse properties of the participants were the single task of talking and the dual task of talking while walking.

The results demonstrated that the dual task did not impact local coherence while global coherence was significantly disrupted in both tasks. However, the global coherence scale was more negatively affected in the dual task compared to the single task. While the relationship between global coherence and cognitive variables was significant in both tasks, the relationship between global coherence and working memory measures was only significant in the dual task. Furthermore, no relationship was observed between the scale of local coherence and either cognitive or working memory measures. 

Our findings corroborate previous findings that local and global coherence is manipulated by different cognitive processes and the maintenance of global coherence requires more demanding cognitive processes and is disrupted before local coherence occurs.

Nonverbal cues include communicative markers like gestures, eye contact, nodding, tone of voice, and intonation among others which are associated and concomitant with language either consciously or unconsciously while playing significant roles in communication. The related literature demonstrates that nonverbal cues have great potential in foreign language learning. In this regard, it was predicted that EFL learners' attitudes toward nonverbal cues could affect their learning process significantly. This descriptive-analytical study was conducted to investigate students' attitudes toward their instructors' use of nonverbal cues in their communication and the extent to which using these elements could facilitate students' learning process. Utilizing a questionnaire as our instrument, we collected data from 50 undergraduate senior students of Linguistics at the University of Gonabad. Our rationale for choosing senior college students was to identify their attitudes toward their instructors' use of nonlinguistic cues since the beginning of their academic career at the university. Our findings revealed that our students had positive attitudes toward teachers' recruitment of nonlinguistic cues in their communication. Moreover, the parameter of gender was not found to affect students' attitudes with both males and females having positive attitudes toward the significance of nonverbal clues in communication. However, the parameter of learners' background experience of utilizing nonverbal clues in their native language was strongly related to their attitude toward EFL learning. Considering the predominant role of nonverbal communication in Iranian EFL settings, it was recommended that their recruitment in English teaching be taken more seriously.

Paralinguistic features are indispensable and crucial aspects of communication without which any utterance would lose its identity. On the other hand, confusion in cross-cultural communication is most often assigned to paralinguistic features. Despite the significant importance of paralinguistic clues in humans’ communication, only limited studies have tackled this issue. More specifically, despite the fact that paralinguistic features are culturally different, no study has investigated the possible relationship between these features and speaking performance of Persian-speaking learners of English. Hence, with this existing gap in the literature, in this study, we tried to scrutinize the impact of paralinguistic cues upon EFL learners’ speaking fluency in the Persian setting. To this objective, we recruited 40 first-year undergraduate female students of Linguistics at the University of Gonabad, utilizing non-random sampling method. Their English proficiency level was determined as lower-intermediate via the administration of Quick Oxford Placement Test. In our pre-test post-test experimental research, we allocated a five-week span of instruction for the purpose of teaching paralinguistic clues to the experimental group to see whether it could have a significant positive impact upon their speaking performance. The instrument we utilized to evaluate speaking capability of our participants was Researcher-Made Speaking Test. The results of our study demonstrated that utilizing paralinguistic features boosted students’ speaking capability. On the light of our finding, it could be concluded that paralinguistic features could be employed for the first-year undergraduate students to enhance their communicative performance. Future studies in diverse EFL settings, could shed light on this conclusion.

Although discourse properties of aphasic patients have beeninvestigated utilizing microlinguistic as well as macrolinguistic approaches, therehave been only a few studies in the Persian setting which have tried to investigatediscourse properties of these brain-damaged patients. Previous researchers haveconcentrated mainly on the two most notorious types of aphasia, namely Brocaand Wernicke. Thus, the coherence properties of transcortical motor patientshave never been given serious consideration by scientists. The current studyaimed to investigate whether and how transcortical aphasia patients differ fromtheir healthy counterparts in the cohesive properties of their discourse with theaim of presenting an exhaustive account of the issue and filling the gap existingin the literature.

In doing so, via mixed-methods approach, cohesive devices in thediscourse of six transcortical motor aphasics (3 participants of each gender,mean age, 56.9 years) and 6 healthy non-aphasic controls (3 participants of eachgender, mean age=57.4 years) were compared.

The results corroborate our hypotheses that the discourse oftranscortical aphasics is less cohesive than that of healthy individuals, and theyhave lots of challenges in constructing grammatically cohesive devices.

The findings further demonstrate that discourse could be differentlydisrupted in diverse forms of aphasia. It is recommended that more research beconducted on different languages so as to shed more light on the issue, enrichingour understanding of the nature of this disease.

This study was conducted with the aim of detecting the social status of Gonabadi dialect as one of the oldest dialects of Iran via the analysis of the effect of social parameters like age, education, gender, and urbanity upon the frequency of Gonabadi usage in diverse fields including family, school, art, office, alley and street, and hobby. Our method was field analysis and the recruited instruments included questionnaire and interview. The sampling method was random based on which our statistical society included 240 participants from three age groups of 12 to 17, 25 to 35 and 50 and more were selected proportionally and equally from each gender and from two urban and rural societies. The results demonstrated that Gonabadi was the dominant language of informal fields, specifically, family, though in the more formal fields including school and office, Persian was the dominant language. Also, the propensity to utilize Persian among female, young, educated and urban participants outweighed this tendency in the male, older, uneducated, and rustic counterparts. Hence, on the light of these results, it could be asserted that Gonabadi is undergoing gradual trend of extinction in the realm of great Khorasan.

So far, there have been three important theories explaining the nature and extent of grammatical deficit in agrammatic aphasia. In this respect, while the two mainly performance-based theories of agrammatics, i.e. trade-off hypothesis (TOH) and mapping hypothesis (MH), provide a very broad account of this deficit, the trace deletion hypothesis (TDH) presents a much narrower stance on the nature of the deficit as well as on the question of modularity. This research, being the first one in the Persian context, tries to test this theory in four gender-, education-, and age-matched Persian-speaking agrammatics and the same matched controls via executing a grammatical judgment test. For the purpose of evaluating our participants’ performance, 90 pairs of sentences, composed of well-formed and ill-formed ones, were presented to the subjects in a randomized manner, based on which participants were supposed to express their opinions regarding their grammaticality in a grammatical judgment task. The types of sentences being testified included active agentive, object cleft, subject cleft, agentive passive, psychological passive and object WH-constructions. Our findings, in line with the predictions of TDH, indicated that agrammatics faced many challenges with constructions in which constituent movements are involved. In contrast, their comprehension remained intact in agentive constructions. The theoretical and psychological implications of the findings are discussed.

Neurolinguists are increasingly inclined to study the language behavior of patients with aphasia (PWAs) to discover more about the relationship between the brain and language.

This study investigated the production of synthetic and root compound nouns in the PWAs to discover how these lexemes were processed.

Using a confrontation naming task, four PWAs (two patients with Broca aphasia and two patients with transcortical motor aphasia) named 80 random black and white drawings of simple and compound nouns. They also repeated the nouns through an auditory repetition task. Compound nouns were of two root and synthetic types. Root nouns belonged to the noun-noun, and synthetic compounds belonged to the noun-verb category.

There was a significant difference between the affected components in naming and repetition of compound nouns. Moreover, there was a significant difference between naming and repetition of simple and compound nouns. There was no significant difference between naming and repetition of root and synthetic nouns.

PWAs process compound nouns through the dual-route model. They cannot retrieve the phonological forms of compound nouns, but they retain their knowledge of word-formation, indicating the modularity of linguistic ability. Morphological structure plays a role in word processing.

So far, many studies have investigated the extent and nature of the grammatical deficit in aphasia. However, to the best of our knowledge, this research is the first in the Persian language to inspect the comprehension of patients with Broca’s aphasia on diverse syntactically complex structures.

To scrutinize the impact of task on aphasics’ performance, four age-, education- and gender-matched Persian-speaking patients with Broca’s aphasia were compared with their healthy matched controls regarding the two different tasks of grammatical judgment and figurine act-out task. The structures used to examine the subjects’ performance included agentive passive, subject cleft, object cleft, object relative clause, and object experiencer psychological verbs.

Our results which supported the trade-off hypothesis, showed that our subjects generally performed better in grammatical judgment task than in figurine act-out task (P≤0.05). Particularly in the second task, as our inner task comparison, the patients’ problems were more severe in object cleft, object experiencer, and object relative clauses: all structures whose interpretations need more cognitive load.

Our findings put more weight on the interactive or constraint-based model of language processing.

A lot of research in diverse languages has tried to scrutinize the impact of canonicity upon the performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease. Regarding the gap in the Persian setting, this study tried to delve into the nature of this deficit in patients with Alzheimer.

This is a case series study, and our subjects included 2 Persian-speaking monolingual patients with Alzheimer and 5 healthy elderly individuals matched with each other according to parameters like educational degree, vernacular tongue, and homeland. The categories to be tested included subject agentive, subject experiencer, object experiencer, and object cleft constructions.

The results of the sentence completion task demonstrated that problems would emerge when patients with Alzheimer try to comprehend the syntactic structures belonged to 2, 3, and 4 categories.

Our findings would demonstrate that patients with Alzheimer have many challenges when trying to map syntactic representation onto semantic realization. This type of deficit escalates when patients attempt to assign thematic roles to psychological predicates. As for the clinical implication of the research, it was recommended that the type of structures utilized by neuropsychiatrists for the communicative purpose be chosen from utterances that are in line with the mapping strategy.

Wernicke’s aphasia is one of the most prominent focal brain deficits affecting the comprehension abilities of patients while preserving their production abilities. Although a lot of studies in different languages have been conducted to analyze the nature of this deficit, still some controversies exist in this regard. While some research studies attribute this defect to a performance problem, some research highlight competence deficit and hypothesize qualitative problems. This research, considering the lack of sufficient literature in Persian, tries to reconcile this controversy by investigating the nature of the semantic field in Persian-speaking patients with Wernicke’s aphasia and to compare their semantic processing abilities with those of healthy controls.

In doing so, a semantic judgment task was administered to 10 patients with Wernicke’s aphasia and their age- and education-matched controls to recognize different semantic relations between a group of words whose meanings were related to each other in some way or another.

The results showed dissociation in the subjects’ performance. While patients with Wernicke’s aphasia had severe deficits in semantic judgment tasks, healthy control performed very well. This selective performance was also observed in different semantic pairs. Also, patients with Wernicke’s aphasia performed poorly in almost all classes of semantic pairs, but the severity of their problems was more prominent in certain semantic categories.

The findings, in line with a competence deficit hypothesis, suggest that linguistic items are processed in the mental lexicon as a semantic unit. Hence, linguistic items are categorized in a brain network correlating with each other based on different semantic relationships.

Wernicke and Broca are two essential types of aphasia in which patients’ productive and comprehensive abilities are affected, respectively. Although the lexico-semantic knowledge, as the heart of language comprehension, has been investigated in many research studies, there are still some controversies regarding the nature of probable lexical deficits in these patients. This study tried to delve into this issue and provide a plausible explanation in the Persian setting.

In doing so, 6 patients with Broca Aphasia (BA), 6 patients with Wernicke Aphasia (WA), and 12 healthy age- and education-matched monolingual controls were selected. Conducting a lexical decision task, each patient was required to decide whether the third word of an auditory presented triplet was meaningful or not. The first and last words of the triplet were related or unrelated to the ambiguous middle word.

The results showed the similarity of the performance of WA patients to that of healthy control. That is, the context shaped by the first word facilitated the activation of the third word. Thus, they exhibited selected access to different meanings of ambiguous words as the healthy controls did. In contrast, semantic facilitation was not observed in BA patients.

Our results supported the previous findings asserting the intactness of semantic representation in WA patients.

Metaphores are considered as one of the most common functions of language and due to their abstract meaning, they can be used to study the performance of patients suffering from cognitive deficits. This research aimed at investigating dead and novel metaphor comprehension in Persian-speaking Alzheimer’s patients, and analyzing the role of executive function in this process. This research has taken advantage of co-relational methods. The sample society is composed of 5 Persian-speaking Alzheimer’s patients whose age and education matched healthy controls. To assess patients’ executive abilities and metaphor comprehension, stroop color, clock drawing and metaphor comprehension tests were used respectively. The results showed Alzheimer’s patients’ deficit in metaphor comprehension, particularly in the novel ones. Patients’ performance in metaphor comprehension was related with theirs in stroop color test and clock drawing tests, although this correlation was more significant in the case of novel metaphors. On the one hand, the relationship between patients’ metaphor comprehension and their executive abilities demonstrated that deficit in executive system plays an important role in patients’ poor metaphor comprehension. On the other hand, this highlights the significant role of pre-frontal cortex in metaphor comprehension.

Linguistic deficits and disorders are among the most significant properties observed in Alzheimer's patients. Pragmatic domain is the major linguistic area affected by the disease. Furthermore, Alzheimer's patients are confronted with lots of problems in the interpretation of figurative and non-literal language. In this research, the abilities of 5 Alzheimer's patients in the comprehension of Persian proverbs have been compared to 10 monolingual education-and- age- matched control via Oral Explanation and Force Choice Tasks. The results of the research indicated the poor performance of Alzheimer's patients compared to the healthy individuals. The poor performance of Alzheimer's patients in MMSE and the relationships between subject's performance in the cognitive tasks of clock Drawing and Stroop Color Task with Proverb Comprehension Task , along with patient's inclination to interpret proverbs literally corroborated that a number of deficits in the cognitive processing domain culminated in the poor performance of patients in proverb comprehension.

In this research, the ability of five Persian-speaking Alzheimer's patients in processing 30 familiar, transparent, non-ambiguous idioms with 10 control subjects who were matched with Alzheimer's patients with respect to age and education has been investigated via oral explanation and force choice tasks. Furthermore, subject's linguistic abilities were assessed using lexical comprehension and semantic fluency tasks and their executive system ability was investigated through stroop color and clock drawing tasks. The results show patient's deficit in idiom comprehension. The weak performance of patients in cognitive and semantic fluency tasks and the relation between cognitive, executive, and idiom comprehension tasks highlight that a set of semantic, executive and cognitive variables affect patient's performance in idiom comprehension. Subject's tendency in interpreting literal meaning of idiom is in accord with those models of idiom processing as Idiom List Hypothesis of Borbrow and Bell ( 1973) or The Configuration Hypothesis of Cacciari and Tabossi (1988) which emphasized on the initial processing of idioms

This paper aims to explore whether the Persian-speaking patients of different stages, ranging from mild to moderate, have a deficit in semantic processing by comparing the performance of Alzheimers patients with that of the healthy individuals.
The subjects of both the groups of Alzheimers patients and healthy control were matched for age, the state of monolingual or bilingual, and socio-cultural status. In order to assess the semantic processing ability of the subjects, Pekkalas 2004 model was adopted. According to the model, the subjects were required to produce (say) the name of as many as category members of animals as possible within the time limit of 60 seconds.
The findings showed that while healthy subjects had an intact semantic processing ability, the AD patients showed weak performance in the five measures of semantic fluency including the number of true linguistic units, the total quantity of words, word size in clusters, the mean cluster size, and the cluster switching.
Following the framework of Troyer (1998b), it has been concluded that AD patients suffer from the semantic processing.

Idiomatic expressions are defined as linguistic structures, which, in contrast with ordinary sentences, can not be interpreted via meaning amalgamation of their constituents. This study aims at surveying the most important psycholinguistic models proposed in the study of idiom comprehension. Furthermore, the significant characteristics of these approaches have been discussed. The common feature of the traditional approaches is their emphasis on the literal meaning processing, that is, these approaches are either adherents of serial meaning processing, i.e., they would assert that literal meaning processing takes place before figurative meaning processing, or they are interested on the parallel meaning processing. However, the common ground of the novel approaches is that they emphasize on the important role of the contextual features in accelerating idiom comprehension. At the end, the notable graded salience hypothesis has been criticized, and the possibility of posing a unified theoretical framework in idiom comprehension has been investigated.

Predicates are words or groups of words which are considered as the most important semantic elements of the sentence. Following Manouilidou, Almeida, Schwartz and Nair, this research investigates the nature of verb disorder in Persian Alzheimer patients. To this end, the property of thematic role assignment by three kinds of predicates has been focused upon. The first kind of predicates includes those whose argument realization follows the standard hierarchical thematic role (e.g. kandan). The second type includes those whose argument realization violates the standard argument realization (e.g. tarsidan). The third type includes those which violate the standard hierarchical thematic roles (e.g. xoshnud kardan). Two monolingual Persian AD patients under the support of Iran’s Alzheimer Association and five matched elderly controls performed a sentence completion task in which they had to choose a predicate that would render the sentence grammatical and meaningful. AD patients showed no problems with canonical structures but performed worse than controls in psychological verb sentences. The results support the hypothesis that AD’s deficit is in the mapping between syntactic and semantic relation, particularly in the assignment of thematic roles to the arguments of the predicates.

Case is one of the morpho-syntactic categories that has been of interest to many linguists. In this paper, following Melčuk (2006), we analyzed the functional and distributional application of case in contemporary Persian and Mazandarani. Through the comparative analysis of sentences, It has been observed that there is abundant similarities between case systems in contemporary Persian and Mazandarani with respect to their function and distribution. Most cases in Mazandarani are Non-Autonomous including accusative, ablative, instrumental and so on. Through this observation, It is concluded that the case system in Mazandarani is gradually degenerating and this verifies Boat's standpoint about this specific phenomenon.