Impaired Verb-Related Morphosyntactic Production in Multiple Sclerosis: Evidence From Greek

Frontiers in Psychology, 2020 · DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.02051 · Published: August 27, 2020

Simple Explanation

This study investigates verb-related morphosyntactic production in MS focusing on Greek, a morphologically rich language. In particular, we focus on subject–verb agreement, time reference/tense, and grammatical aspect. A sentence completion task was used to assess the production of subject–verb agreement, time reference/tense, and grammatical aspect. Participants with MS were compared to neurologically healthy controls. The study found that individuals with MS showed impairments in verb-related morphosyntactic production, particularly in grammatical aspect. This suggests that language deficits can occur in MS.

Study Duration

Not specified

Participants

39 Greek-speaking individuals with MS [25 RRMS, 14 SPMS]

Evidence Level

Not specified

Key Findings

1
Overall, the RRMS and SPMS groups performed signiﬁcantly worse than their matched control groups.
2
All four groups performed signiﬁcantly worse on grammatical aspect than on subject–verb agreement and time reference.
3
The RRMS group did not diﬀer signiﬁcantly from the SPMS group in any of the three morphosyntactic categories.

Research Summary

The study investigated verb-related morphosyntactic production in individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS), focusing on subject-verb agreement, time reference/tense, and grammatical aspect in Greek. The results showed that individuals with MS, including both RRMS and SPMS subtypes, performed significantly worse than their matched control groups on the sentence completion task. The pattern of performance of individuals with MS is identical to that exhibited by neurologically healthy individuals. Thus, the production performance of individuals with MS on verb inﬂection differs from that of healthy controls quantitatively but not qualitatively.

Practical Implications

Clinical Relevance

Impairment in grammatical aspect production may be clinically relevant in MS patients, given its link to expressive language and reduced quality of life.

Cognitive Assessment

Highlights the need for thorough cognitive assessments in MS patients to understand the role of cognition in morphosyntactic difficulties.

Future Research Directions

Future studies should investigate the specific cognitive systems involved in verb-related morphosyntactic production and explore the neural substrates of these impairments using neuroimaging data.

Study Limitations

1
The participants with MS and the healthy controls have not completed a thorough cognitive assessment.
2
The relatively small samples of participants with RRMS and SPMS.
3
The lack of significant difference between time reference/tense and subject–verb agreement might have been found.

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