article · Aphasiology
Pronoun comprehension in Moroccan Arabic was evaluated in five individuals with agrammatic aphasia alongside twenty typical control participants. The investigation analysed how pronoun types, specifically personal versus reflexive pronouns, interact with sentence structures such as transitive forms and exceptional case-marking constructions. Participants completed a sentence-picture matching task measuring both interpretive accuracy and reaction times. The results revealed substantial variation among individuals, with none entirely matching the predictions of the Revised Slowed Syntax Hypothesis. Impairments in comprehension accuracy were most consistent when processing personal pronouns within exceptional case-marking constructions, which also produced slower response times. These findings support the vulnerability of complex syntactic structures while highlighting processing trade-offs between accuracy and speed, suggesting that resource-based models may better explain sentence processing difficulties.
Understanding how grammatical deficits manifest across diverse languages is essential for evaluating language disorders. By exploring Moroccan Arabic, this work clarifies how complex sentence structures affect comprehension in people with aphasia. Demonstrating the link between sentence complexity, response speeds, and comprehension accuracy aids in developing more nuanced linguistic models of how language processing breaks down following neurological injury.
The findings represent early-stage linguistic research rather than a direct commercial product. The insights could eventually inform the design of targeted speech and language assessment materials or rehabilitation programmes tailored to Moroccan Arabic speakers with aphasia. Speech-language pathologists and clinical assessment designers are the potential end users, though the research remains at an exploratory stage far from practical deployment.
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Background Pronoun comprehension in agrammatic aphasia has been widely studied for its implications for sentence processing. The Revised Slowed Syntax Hypothesis (SSH) attributes difficulties to interactions between pronoun type and sentence complexity, particularly for personal pronouns in exceptional case-marking constructions (ECMC). However, its cross-linguistic validity remains unclear.Aim This exploratory case series investigated pronoun comprehension in Moroccan Arabic-speaking PWAA, examining the interaction between pronoun type (personal vs. reflexive) and syntactic structure (transitive vs. ECMC).Methods & Procedures Five PWAA and 20 typical control participants completed a sentence-picture matching task that examined the interaction between pronoun type and syntactic structure. Comprehension was measured at the individual level using both accuracy and reaction time (RT) to capture interpretive outcomes and processing dynamics.Outcomes & Results No PWAA fully matched the Revised SSH’s predictions, indicating substantial inter-individual variability. Accuracy impairments were most consistently observed for personal pronouns in ECMC, which also elicited slower RTs. RTs generally reflected increased processing costs in ECMC, although patterns varied across individuals.Conclusions The findings support the core logic of the Revised SSH, particularly the vulnerability of personal pronouns in ECMC, but also indicate variability and accuracy-RT dissociations better captured by a resource-based extension. In the absence of a non-agrammatic comparison group, results should be interpreted as characterizing this sample rather than as specific to agrammatic aphasia.
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DOI: 10.1080/02687038.2026.2725575
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