Lexical, Inflectional and Agreement Production of Arabic Noun Phrase in Agrammatism

Agrammatism is a language disorder due to an acquired brain damage. Studying agrammatism in highly inflectional languages like Arabic can be very revealing for linguistic theories and highly significant for speech language pathology. The Arabic noun phrase exhibits one of the richest morpho-syntactic structures in Arabic. Despite being morpho-syntactically rich, the Arabic noun phrase did not receive enough attention in aphasia literature. The current study aims to explore the production of the noun phrase by Arabic speakers with agrammatism to increase knowledge of morpho-syntax in aphasia. The study examines the lexical, inflectional and agreement production in three types of Arabic noun phrase: the adjectival noun phrase, the construct state noun phrase, and the non-construct state noun phrase. This study is the first study that addresses the production of these different Arabic noun phrase types in agrammatism.
Nine Saudi Arabic speakers with aphasia and agrammatism demonstrating varying degrees of severity participated in the study. A testing tool was developed to elicit the production of the three Arabic noun phrase types. The test development resulted in four linguistic subtests: the Number and Gender Agreement Subtest, the Definiteness Agreement Subset, the Construct State Subtest and the Non-Construct State Subtest. A pilot study was carried on the test instrument prior to conducting the main experiment to test the reliability and the validity of the instrument.
The results of the four linguistic subtests revealed that there was higher accuracy for masculine than for feminine and for singular than for plural forms. The indefinite forms tended to be produced for definite forms. Most gender and number errors were due to production of masculine singular inflection, and the feminine plural was more impaired than masculine
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plural. Lastly, most ungrammatical phrases were due to inflectional errors in either the adjective or the particle, and most lexical errors in the Number and Gender Agreement Subtest and Non-construct State Subtest were modifiers’ lexical errors.
The results contributed to the morph-syntactic characterisation of noun phrase production in aphasia and agrammatism within Arabic and cross-linguistically. The data were mainly analysed from a neurolinguistic perspective taking into consideration a range of different morpho-syntactic theories of NP and agrammatism. The data were also considered within psycholinguistic accounts of gender and number processing, and recent accounts of language production in aphasia instantiated in usage-based accounts of grammar. Patterns of error have been accounted for by all three theoretical accounts, but no one single account could interpret all error patterns. The study has provided a number of theoretical implications, and has implied directions for future research of Arabic NP in agrammatism.