Lecture by Roelien Bastiaanse on ‘ Time Reference in Individuals with Aphasia ’

On March 30a lecture by Professor Roelien Bastiaanse (University of Groningen, Netherlands) ‘Time Reference in Individuals with Aphasia’ will take place at HSE. The event is organized by the Neurolinguistics laboratory.

Abstract:

 In Dutch, the time frame in which an event takes place is reflected in the verb form: when we refer to the past, we must use either past tense (hij schreef: lit. ‘he wrote’) or the present perfect, in which the auxiliary is in present tense (hij heeft geschreven: lit. he has written). It has often been suggested that agrammatic speakers have problems with tense in general (e.g., Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997; Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2005). However, Bastiaanse (2008) suggested that it is not tense that is impaired, but reference to the past through verb inflection. This led to a number of studies in a wide variety of languages: Turkish, a language with a very large verb inflection paradigm, Chinese and Indonesian, languages without verb inflection, English and Dutch, with a small verb inflection paradigm. Also, different populations have been tested: monolingual agrammatic speakers; bilingual English (small paradigm) – Swahili (large paradigm) agrammatic speakers, fluent aphasic speakers and healthy speakers, using different methodologies: offline testing and online testing, including fMRI.

The data all point into one direction: different processes are involved in making reference to the past and the non-past (present and future) and brain damage can selectively affect linguistic processes needed for reference to the past. The implications of these findings will be discussed.

Working language: English
Start time: 14.00
Address: 21/4 Staraya Basmannaya Ulitsa, Building 1, Room 510.