Tense/agreement in Moroccan Arabic: The Tree-Pruning Hypothesis

The present study presents results from picture description, sentence completion and grammaticality judgment tasks with four MA-speaking Broca’s aphasic subjects and four age, sex, and education matched control subjects investigating tense and agreement markers. Specifically, the study explores tense and agreement disassociation in agrammatic speakers of Moroccan Arabic as predicted by the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis (Friedmann & Grodzinsky 1997) with extension of the inquiry to determine whether the disassociation is production-specific and/or modality-specific. For all experimental tasks, it was found out that the 4 MA-speaking Broca’s aphasic subjects achieved high correctness scores for agreement, while tense was impaired. The results of the study suggest that the tense/agreement dissociation reported for Hebrew (Friedmann & Grodzinsky 1997) and German (Wenzlaff & Clahsen 2004) can be replicated in Moroccan Arabic. However, the syntactic account as outlined in Friedmann and Grodzinsky (1997) cannot account for the tense/agreement dissociation because Moroccan Arabic has the agreement node above the tense node. Based on results from the study, it is argued that the production deficit in Moroccan Arabic agrammatism cannot be explained in terms of the Tree-Pruning Hypothesis, but rather in terms of a processing account that takes the view that access to syntactic knowledge is blocked; grammatical knowledge, however, is entirely intact.