Effect of distance between marker agreement dependencies on sentence comprehension in persons with aphasia

Background: Rules and regularities are embedded in all the language structures. Extracting these helps in speech-language acquisition and processing. Sentence processing relies on transitional probability of the dependencies and its distance which are present within the sentence. Aim: To investigate the effect of distance between marker agreement dependencies on sentence comprehension in Persons with Aphasia (PWA) and Neuro- Typical Individuals (NTI). Methods: Ten PWA and Ten NTI were recruited for the study. Participants whose native language was Kannada (a South Indian Language) and received formal education of minimum 10th grade were selected. Materials: A total of 60 Kannada sentences were used and grouped into three categories i.e., short sentence (had short distance between dependencies) (SSD); Longer sentences (had long distance between dependencies) (LLD) and longer sentences (had short distance between dependencies) (LSD). The agreement markers in the sentence were manipulated w.r.t distance among them and grouped it as adjacent (short distance) and non-adjacent (long distance) type of sentences. Procedure: The participants were instructed to read the sentence and judge whether it is grammatically correct or not by pressing the key corresponding to 'yes' or 'no' on the keyboard. In addition, modified N-back task was administered. Results and Discussion: Accuracy and reaction time measures were derived for each sentence types. NTI showed better performance than PWA in sentence judgment task. Both the groups, performed poorly on LSD type of sentence when compared to other sentence types. LSD type was more complex due to the syntactic demands placed by the antecedent preposition, pronoun and adverb placed nearer to the verb and also longer distance between subject agreement to the verb.