Agrammatism and Other Aphasia-related Disorders in Moroccan Arabic Speaking Aphasics

This paper includes the participation of six Moroccan Arabic-speaking aphasics (four with Broca’s aphasia, one with Wernicke’s aphasia and one with global aphasia). In our work, we turn to a particular under-resourced Arabic Dialect, Moroccan Darija or Moroccan Arabic (MA), which is an agglutinative language; that is, a fairly large number of affixes may be added to the root. Negation, tense, aspect, person, number and gender are all expressed by affixes attached to the verb. The speech corpora were taken from samples collected from patients who have attended speech and language therapy sessions. The patients were presented with picture description, repetition and grammaticality judgement tasks in order to examine the extent of impairment on the phonological, lexical, semantic and morpho-syntactic levels. Although agrammatic production is usually described as impaired in all aspects of grammar and in all types of inflection, it was found out that the use of verbal and nominal bound morphemes was spared in the output of the subjects understudy. All the three groups in this study used appropriate verbal and nominal morphology, which does not support the traditional view of agrammatism as being amorphological.