Tense Dissociation in Agrammatic Aphasia

This book investigates tense production difficulties in a Shona-speaking individual with Broca's agrammatic aphasia, focusing on the differential impairment of past, present, and future tenses. Through experimental tasks including the Test for Assessing Reference (TART) and spontaneous narrative elicitation, data revealed that future tense production was significantly impaired, whereas past and present tenses remained relatively intact. These findings contrast with established hypotheses such as the Tree Pruning Hypothesis, which predicts impairment across both past and future tenses, and differ from previous cross-linguistic studies predominantly reporting past tense deficits. The study highlights the influence of language-specific morphosyntactic structures and discourse linking on tense processing in agrammatic aphasia, emphasizing the complexity and variability of tense impairments across languages. This research contributes valuable evidence to the understanding of tense representation in aphasia within Bantu languages and calls for further investigation into language-dependent mechanisms underlying morphosyntactic deficits.