The Effect of Morphosemantic Treatmenton Verb Tense Inflection in Persian-speaking Patients With Agrammatism: ASingle-Subject Study

Background:One of the relatively common symptoms in non-fluent aphasia is agrammatism.Agrammatism is characterized with low syntactic complexity anddeficitsin verbs inflection especially tense markers. Verbs as the main core of sentences have vital function on effective communication.Objectives:The current study aimed at evaluating the effect of morphosemantic method on verb tense inflection in Persian-speaking aphasicpatients with agrammatism.Methods:The participants were two aphasic males with agrammatism and verb inflection deficits. The current study had a single-subject ABA design.The material were 46black and white line-drawing pictures related to 23 verbsincluding 10 training, 10 expansion,and three exemplar verbs drawn inpresent and past tenses.During three phases, the percentage of correct verb inflection in thetraining andexpansion verbs was measuredand also the graph examination of level, trend and slope, C statistic, 2-standard deviationband, effect size (percentageof non-overlapping data) and d statisticwere used to analyze thedata.Results:Both participants demonstrated significant changes in training and expansion verbs during therapeutic sessions in comparison to the baseline (P<0.05). The effect of therapy was maintained for a three-week follow-up.Conclusion:Therapy for verb inflection in spontaneous speech is clinically important. The current study demonstrated that morphosemantic method can be used successfully for tense marker deficits in Persian-speaking patients with agrammatism.

کلیدواژه ها:

Aphasia ، Agrammatism ، Treatment Efficacy ، Single Subject Design