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Introduction: Among many grammatical problems affecting agrammatic patients, those of inflectional morphology, specifically tense, stand at the forefront. This study aimed to analyze tense properties in Mazandarani-speaking Broca patients to see which aspects of this inflectional system were more negatively affected. Materials and Methods: Utilizing inclusion/exclusion criteria, we chose 10 patients (mean age 47 years) in this descriptive-analytical research. To select our participants, some criteria including the results of the Persian aphasia test, monolingualism, and magnetic resonance imaging reports were considered which corroborated the involvement of the anterior frontal lobe, inferior anterior parietal lobe, Perisylvian, and Broca's areas as well as inferior frontal gyrus. To monitor our patients' performance in three separate tenses of present (progressive), future, and past (simple past, past perfect, and past continuous), we administered written sentence completion and sentence-to-picture matching tests. To investigate whether our patients' performance in diverse verb tenses was significantly different, we utilized Wilcoxon statistics to analyze our data. Results: The results demonstrated a significant difference between the performance of the patients in past progressive tense compared to other tenses (P=0.02). Furthermore, a significant difference was observed between the mean responses to past tenses and present-future tenses. Conclusion: Mazandarani-speaking agrammatic demonstrated selective poor performance in the past tense inflection. Regarding the crucial role of tense properties in verbal communication, specifically past tense, to talk about past events and memories, more attention is needed by clinicians and speech therapists to reinforce tense properties enhancing agrammatic communication capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Broca and Wernicke's patients perform satisfactorily regarding the processing of canonical syntactic structures, as maintained by previous studies; however, there has been a gap in the literature because no particular research has yet investigated the performance of these patients in the Persian circumstances once they were required to analyze sentences which would demand extra-semantic processing. This study clarifies the role of two critical semantic operations demanding extra-semantic processing at the sentential level: Aspectual coercion. It complements to provide some evidence on the localist view of the brain. Our rationale for selecting these operations was their pure semantic nature, not relying on morphosyntactic properties. Materials and Methods: Having recruited two age- and education-matched Broca, two Wernicke, and four healthy controls, we conducted a semantic judgment task in which the participants were asked to express their correct semantic judgment in the two coercion and two normal conditions. Results: Our results showed an approximately above-chance performance of the Broca group for all conditions; however, in the Wernicke group, the same result was not observed due to their poor performance in coercion conditions, though in ordinary sentences, they performed much better. Conclusion: Our findings, along with similar off-line and imaging studies, corroborate the view of localism, based on which Wernicke's area is mainly responsible for the primary semantic operations while Broca's area predominantly takes over syntactic parsing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The production of figurative expressions, particularly idioms, and proverbs, is negatively affected by damage to the left hemisphere and subcortical area of the brain. Alzheimer patients, thanks to the preservation of basal ganglia, can produce these expressions. In contrast, compared to Alzheimer's patients, Parkinson's patients cannot produce these expressions due to the malfunction of the basal ganglia. This study attempts to compare the linguistic and cognitive performance of Persian-speaking patients with Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and healthy counterparts regarding the production and comprehension of these figurative expressions. Materials and Methods: In doing so, by selecting a sample of participants composed of 10 Alzheimer's patients, 10 Parkinson's patients, and 10 healthy individuals matched with each other regarding age and education. Then, different tests, including Arizona battery for communication disorders of dementia, famous names, and face test, structured conversation, figurative expression completion, elicitation of response based on situational context, Northridge evaluation of idioms and proverbs in situational context, conventional and figurative expression evaluation were condcuted to analyze their performance. Results: The results of Arizona battery for communication disorders of dementia indicated that Alzheimer's patients were in the middle stage of the disease while Parkinson's participants were classified as non-dementia patients. Although the result of the Renown face and name recognition test demonstrated a significant difference between Alzheimer's patients and the healthy group regarding cognition and confidence levels, the same result was not observed between healthy control and Alzheimer's patients. Furthermore, in the test of structured conversation, the proportion of produced words by Alzheimer's patients was more than that of Parkinson's patients. However, the results of sentence and figurative expression completion tests corroborated the weaker performance of Alzheimer's patients compared to their Parkinson and healthy counterparts. Furthermore, notwithstanding in the test of Elicitation of response based on Situational Context, Parkinson's patients performed more poorly than their Alzheimer and healthy counterparts, in the tests of conventional and figurative expression evaluation, Alzheimer's patients' pattern of performance was different from that of other groups as they performed more weakly than Parkinson patients. Conclusion: The observed dissociation in the performance of Alzheimer as well as Parkinson's patients in the linguistic production and comprehension tests shed light on the significant role of the subcortical area of the brain in the production of idioms and proverbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: The study of the relationship between bilingualism and the possible impact it might have on the control aspect of intelligence of adults in general and preschool children, in particular, has always been the subject of controversy for researchers. This research, following the related findings and gaps in the literature and inspired by Craik and Bialystok's (2005) framework, tries to divulge whether bilingualism could be related to the control aspect of intelligence. As our secondary goal, we also tried to see whether there are correlations between different tests assessing control. Methods: In this descriptive correlational study, via the convenience sampling method, we selected our participants. Methods: In doing so, 10 age-gender-matched Mazandaranispeaking monolinguals and the same matched bilinguals have been selected. Moreover, the literacy and socioeconomic status of subjects have been controlled. The tests for assessing subjects' executive control included day-night Stroop, the dimensional change card sort (DCCS), test of variables of attention (TOVA), and the computerized attention network test (ANT). Our participants' performance in language proficiency task as well as control tasks was demonstrated. Furthermore, via the conduction of the Pearson correlation statistics, the relationships between the participants' performance in diverse control tasks and language task were investigated. Results: The results showed that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in all control tests except DCCS. Conclusion: Bilingualism could provide children with an executive control advantage promoting them in tasks demanding thought and action control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Many studies have suggested a relationship between coherence and cognitive processes. This study aims to investigate this hypothesis by assessing the relationship between cognitive variables and coherence in the discourse of 2 groups of Persianspeaking young adults and the elderly. Methods: To evaluate our participants' cognitive capabilities, we employed the cognitive tests of the mini-mental status test, the Stroop-color task, the digit symbol copy task, the clock-drawing task, and the backward digit span. On the other hand, the specific tasks to evaluate the discourse properties of the participants were the single task of talking and the dual task of talking while walking. Results: The results demonstrated that the dual task did not impact local coherence while global coherence was significantly disrupted in both tasks. However, the global coherence scale was more negatively affected in the dual task compared to the single task. While the relationship between global coherence and cognitive variables was significant in both tasks, the relationship between global coherence and working memory measures was only significant in the dual task. Furthermore, no relationship was observed between the scale of local coherence and either cognitive or working memory measures. Conclusion: Our findings corroborate previous findings that local and global coherence is manipulated by different cognitive processes and the maintenance of global coherence requires more demanding cognitive processes and is disrupted before local coherence occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonverbal cues include communicative markers like gestures, eye contact, nodding, tone of voice, and intonation among others which are associated and concomitant with language either consciously or unconsciously while playing significant roles in communication. The related literature demonstrates that nonverbal cues have great potential in foreign language learning. In this regard, it was predicted that EFL learners' attitudes toward nonverbal cues could affect their learning process significantly. This descriptive-analytical study was conducted to investigate students' attitudes toward their instructors' use of nonverbal cues in their communication and the extent to which using these elements could facilitate students' learning process. Utilizing a questionnaire as our instrument, we collected data from 50 undergraduate senior students of Linguistics at the University of Gonabad. Our rationale for choosing senior college students was to identify their attitudes toward their instructors' use of nonlinguistic cues since the beginning of their academic career at the university. Our findings revealed that our students had positive attitudes toward teachers' recruitment of nonlinguistic cues in their communication. Moreover, the parameter of gender was not found to affect students' attitudes with both males and females having positive attitudes toward the significance of nonverbal clues in communication. However, the parameter of learners' background experience of utilizing nonverbal clues in their native language was strongly related to their attitude toward EFL learning. Considering the predominant role of nonverbal communication in Iranian EFL settings, it was recommended that their recruitment in English teaching be taken more seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Fundamental notions of mapping hypothesis and canonicity were scrutinized in Persian-speaking aphasics. Methods: To this end, the performance of four age-, education-, and gender matched Persian-speaking Broca's patients and eight matched healthy controls in diverse complex structures were compared via the conduction of two tasks of syntactic comprehension and grammaticality judgment. Results: The tested structures included subject agentive, agentive passive, object experience, subject experience, subject cleft, and object cleft constructions. Our results, while corroborating the predictions of the mapping hypothesis, showed that in structures, in which linguistic elements were substituted and dislocated out of their canonical syntactic positions, namely, agentive passive, subject experiencer, object experiencer, and object cleft constructions, Broca's problems escalated. In contrast, in those structures whose constituent concatenations were aligned with canonical syntactic structures, namely subject agentive, and cleft structures, patients had above the chance performance. Ultimately, the theoretical and clinical implications of the study were discussed. Conclusion: The number of predicates in a sentence, predicate types (psychological and agentive), as well as semantic heuristics and canonicity all by all could be regarded as the major culprits for aphasics' poor performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: So far, many studies have investigated the extent and nature of the grammatical deficit in aphasia. However, to the best of our knowledge, this research is the first in the Persian language to inspect the comprehension of patients with Broca’s aphasia on diverse syntactically complex structures. Materials and Methods: To scrutinize the impact of task on aphasics’ performance, four age-, education- and gender-matched Persian-speaking patients with Broca’s aphasia were compared with their healthy matched controls regarding the two different tasks of grammatical judgment and figurine act-out task. The structures used to examine the subjects’ performance included agentive passive, subject cleft, object cleft, object relative clause, and object experiencer psychological verbs. Results: Our results which supported the trade-off hypothesis, showed that our subjects generally performed better in grammatical judgment task than in figurine act-out task (P≤0.05). Particularly in the second task, as our inner task comparison, the patients’ problems were more severe in object cleft, object experiencer, and object relative clauses: all structures whose interpretations need more cognitive load. Conclusion: Our findings put more weight on the interactive or constraint-based model of language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Wernicke and Broca are two essential types of aphasia in which patients' productive and comprehensive abilities are affected, respectively. Although the lexico-semantic knowledge, as the heart of language comprehension, has been investigated in many research studies, there are still some controversies regarding the nature of probable lexical deficits in these patients. This study tried to delve into this issue and provide a plausible explanation in the Persian setting. Materials and Methods: In doing so, 6 patients with Broca Aphasia (BA), 6 patients with Wernicke Aphasia (WA), and 12 healthy age- and education-matched monolingual controls were selected. Conducting a lexical decision task, each patient was required to decide whether the third word of an auditory presented triplet was meaningful or not. The first and last words of the triplet were related or unrelated to the ambiguous middle word. Results: The results showed the similarity of the performance of WA patients to that of healthy control. That is, the context shaped by the first word facilitated the activation of the third word. Thus, they exhibited selected access to different meanings of ambiguous words as the healthy controls did. In contrast, semantic facilitation was not observed in BA patients. Conclusion: Our results supported the previous findings asserting the intactness of semantic representation in WA patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: This paper aims to explore whether the Persian-speaking patients of different stages, ranging from mild to moderate, have a deficit in semantic processing by comparing the performance of Alzheimer's patients with that of the healthy individuals. Methods: The subjects of both the groups of Alzheimer's patients and healthy control were matched for age, the state of monolingual or bilingual, and socio-cultural status. In order to assess the semantic processing ability of the subjects, Pekkala's 2004 model was adopted. According to the model, the subjects were required to produce (say) the name of as many as category members of animals as possible within the time limit of 60 seconds. Results: The findings showed that while healthy subjects had an intact semantic processing ability, the AD patients showed weak performance in the five measures of semantic fluency including the number of true linguistic units, the total quantity of words, word size in clusters, the mean cluster size, and the cluster switching. Discussion: Conclusion: Following the framework of Troyer (1998b), it has been concluded that AD patients suffer from the semantic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Idiomatic expressions are defined as linguistic structures, which, in contrast with ordinary sentences, can not be interpreted via meaning amalgamation of their constituents. This study aims at surveying the most important psycholinguistic models proposed in the study of idiom comprehension. Furthermore, the significant characteristics of these approaches have been discussed. The common feature of the traditional approaches is their emphasis on the literal meaning processing, that is, these approaches are either adherents of serial meaning processing, i.e., they would assert that literal meaning processing takes place before figurative meaning processing, or they are interested on the parallel meaning processing. However, the common ground of the novel approaches is that they emphasize on the important role of the contextual features in accelerating idiom comprehension. At the end, the notable graded salience hypothesis has been criticized, and the possibility of posing a unified theoretical framework in idiom comprehension has been investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]