Process of Inflectional Elements in Persian Broca’s Aphasic Patients

Aphasia is among the most fascinating and complex neurolinguistics problems that numerous clinicians encounter in clinical settings. It is defined as an impairment in producing or comprehending language resulted from acute brain injury, like a cerebrovascular accident. There are several types of aphasia. Each type is categorized as either fluent or non–fluent. Broca’s aphasia is a non–fluent type. Inflectional elements are among the most vulnerable characteristics in the development of Broca’s aphasia. Several studied proposed that regular inflection is critically sub–served by Brocachr('39')s area. This suggestion was motivated by the finding that English speaking Brocachr('39')s aphasics demonstrated selective deficits with regular inflection. Inflection in Persian language is a phenomenon that could be observed in verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs. The present study aimed to explore the process and production of inflectional elements in the speech of Persian Broca’s aphasic patients.

To conduct this descriptive–analytical study, 4 post–injury Broca’s aphasic patients meeting the research inclusion criteria and referring to different clinics of Tehran City, Iran, were selected. All of them presented lesion in the left hemisphere. The Computed Tomography (CT) scan or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data revealed that all the patients had a left hemisphere lesion that occurred at least 6 months prior to enrolling in this study. All study subjects were right–handed prior to the left hemisphere injury and reported no history of other neurological conditions. They also had no history or imaging evidence of other strokes. Their descriptive and spontaneous speeches were evaluated based on Nilipour’s Persian Aphasic Battery Test (1993). Their speeches were also rewritten for further precise analysis. 

The mean number of inflectional elements in the speech of the investigated subjects highlighted that they had difficulty in the proper using of these inflectional elements. Based on the linguistic characteristics of the studied patients and their provided data, there was no significant difference between employing inflectional elements among them.

The present study results indicated that Persian aphasic patients act differently in using various inflections. Accordingly, the inflectional vulnerability level was dissimilar among these patients. They did relatively well in the production of verb inflections; however, they were severely damaged concerning using the inflections of adjectives and adverbs. There was no significant difference between inflectional forms in the speech of these patients in terms of frequency of use. The obtained data revealed that the inflectional damages are placed in a continuum; in one end of the continuum we could place verb inflections and the adverb inflections at the other end; as a non–defected and defected form, respectively. The present investigation findings are in line with those of previous research studies on Broca’s aphasia. Additionally, the current study outcomes are undoubtedly useful when combined with the results of other relevant studies.