Assessment Battery for morphosyntactic processing in Rioplatense Spanish: a pilot study

MARIA PAZ OLIVA; MARÍA ELINA SÁNCHEZ; CAMILA STECHER; YAMILA SEVILLA; JAICHENCO, VIRGINIA

Workshop; 2nd International School on Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics and Clinical Linguistics.; 2021

This presentation describes the development and implementation of an assessment battery specifically design to evaluate the morphosyntactic processing during language comprehension and production of people with aphasia (PWA) in Rioplatense Spanish (RS).The difficulties in morphosyntactic processing that PWA exhibit is known as agrammatism, which results into a particular linguistic profile. Concerning the production, these patients utilize a limited set of syntactic structures, present a reduced speech rate, tend to use crystallized expressions, infinitive verbs or present tenses and omit functional words, main verbs and morphemes. Regarding the comprehension, complications appear when the sentence does not follow the canonical order (e.g. in Spanish: subject-verb-object). This deficit is widely discussed in neurolinguistic literature, but it is usually not precisely considered in assessment batteries. Furthermore, the evaluation methods available have other limitations: some are not supported by a strong framework of linguistic and psycholinguistics theories based on facts, others are translations not accurately adapt to RS. Due to that, the battery developed and used in this project makes a difference, as it is founded on updated discussions and theoretical knowledge in the research field and in the clinic of language impairment caused by neurological disorders. For the design of the tests we focus on the various grammatical problems reported in the literature about agrammatism, in general, and in Spanish, in particular: semantic reversibility, argument structure, word order, agreement and tense inflection, clitic pronouns, negation and sentence length. Assessments include: denomination of actions; production of sentences with different syntactic structures (actives, passives, cleft object, with subject and object relative clauses, interrogatives, negatives) and verbs with different argument structure (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) from draws; production of sentences from an oral preamble provided by the examiner (with agreement and tense features manipulated); comprehension of sentences with different types of verbs (transitive, psychological) and syntactic structures; sentences repetition; production and comprehension of clitic pronouns. The battery also involves a set of tests that evaluate the working memory. Once it is completed, the instrument offers a total score regarding the linguistics profile of the patient. A goal of the project is to obtain a standardized index that could be used in the future as a comparative normative measure. Currently, the battery is being proved with a pilot study. The systematization and analyze of the data will permit the final selection of items and tests that will conform the instrument, to be validated and normalized afterwards. During the pilot, assessments will be taken to 45 healthy people divided into three groups of age (20 to 40, 40 to 60, +60) and three of educational level (< 7 years, 8-12 years, + 12 years). Finally, the evidence collected with this battery will lead us to make progress on the ongoing research on psycholinguistic processing and language disorders. Most importantly, It will allow the confluence between theoretical linguistic and the clinic of language impairment. We expect that this non-existing tool until the moment in Argentina that will make a significant contribution to the evaluation, diagnosis and future treatment of PWA with agrammatism in RS.