A linguistically-driven response categorisation protocol for Arabic nouns and verbs: clinical and research applications

Research into language breakdown in Arabic has been growing in the last two decades. The field, however, remains challenged by the lack of assessment materials, normative databases, and standards for categorising responses from participants with language impairment. The aim of this paper is to introduce a linguistically driven protocol for categorising responses from Arabic-speaking patients and healthy participants in language production tasks. The protocol is informed by Arabic morpho-syntactic/morpho-phonological features such as inflection for gender, person, and number; and on a larger scale agreement in noun phrases and verb phrases. The emerging error categories are applicable to different Arabic varieties and sub-varieties. The data supporting the resulting error categorisation protocol stem from responses from patients with aphasia performing various production tasks.