Verbal inflection deficit in Kurdish-speaking aphasia patients

Aphasia is a language disorder which can affect different aspects of language production and comprehension. Broca’s aphasia is a non-fluent type of aphasia in which patients suffer from a deficit in the use of function words and inflectional categories of the verb.

Two Kurdish- Speaking patients diagnosed with Broca’s Aphasia were selected to be investigated for their linguistic performance in the main inflectional categories of verbs including grammatical agreement, tense and aspect. To collect the data, natural conversations of the patients were recorded to be analyzed. Sentence Completion Task (SCT) was, also, employed to find the less frequent inflectional categories. SPSS version 23 was utilized to analyze the collected corpora.

Both patients had a relatively intact agreement system, while both committed a higher number of errors as far as grammatical tense is concerned. Finally, the worst linguistic performance for the two patients was reported to be in the appropriate use of markers to represent grammatical aspect.

Grammatical aspect was found to be the most problematic inflectional category, while grammatical agreement was the least severely damage category for Kurdish-speaking aphasic patients.