An international team of researchers, including scientists from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, has identifi! the causes of impairments in expressing grammatical tense in people with aphasia. They discover! 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 publish! 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 Scientists Find the origins
of these difficulties, researchers from universities in Russia, Greece, Italy, the US, and Norway conduct! an experiment. They hypothesis! that tense expression came online recently and their local impairments could stem from two distinct processes: encoding and retrieval. During encoding, a speaker forms the concept of time (for example, whether an action occurr! 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 carri! out experiments consumers’ lack of understanding of their rights 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 design! two sentence-completion tasks. The first task ask! participants to fill in blanks in sentences, requiring both processes—encoding and retrieval. They malaysia numbers list had to complete the sentence according to the model, considering the change in the tense form of the verb. For example: ‘Yesterday, the gardener water! the flowers.
Tomorrow, the gardener will… the flowers.’ The second tasks expect! participants to complete sentences without changing the verb tense. They were given the phrase ‘to water the plants’ and heard the example sentence ‘The gardener is currently collecting mushrooms.’ Then they were then prompt! to begin a sentence with ‘The gardener is currently…’ and complete it with the phrase ‘watering the plants’ in the correct form, resulting in ‘is watering the plants.’