Background: Languages of the world have several ways of expressing time reference. Many languages such as those in the Indo-European group express time reference through tense. Languages such as Chinese and Standard Indonesian express time reference through aspectual adverbs, while Akan does so through grammatical tone. Previous studies have found that time reference is selectively impaired, with reference to the past being more impaired than reference to the non-past. The PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH) posits that pastime reference is difficult because it requires discourse linking. Aims: The goal of this study was first to examine whether pastime reference is impaired also in languages that do not use grammatical affixes but rather tone, to make time reference. Second, this study aims to decouple the effect of tone from the effect of temporal reference on Akan verbs. Method and Procedures: Ten Akan agrammatic speakers and 10 non-brain-damaged speakers (NBDs) participated in this study. An Akan adapted version of the Test for Assessing Reference of Time (African TART), for both production and comprehension was used. The TART focuses on the future, present (habitual) and the pastime frames. Additionally, five of the agrammatic speakers performed two tonal discrimination tasks: a non-linguistic and a linguistic (lexical) one. Outcomes and Results: While the NBDs scored at ceiling, the agrammatic speakers made errors, and these affected past more than present and the future time references, in both comprehension and production tasks. However, the comprehension data showed a dissociation between the present habitual and the future. The substitution error analysis revealed a preference for the present. The five agrammatic speakers showed an intact performance on non-linguistic tonal discrimination task. Conclusion:The conclusion is that regardless of how time reference is expressed, whether through inflectional morphology or grammatical ARTICLE HISTORY

Abstract. On the basis of a comparison between sentence judgements in English vs. Akan, we argue that island constraints (positions to which a question word can be linked) cannot be reduced to the effects of the sentence processing mechanism. Questions that violate constraints are judged better in Akan than in English, although the challenge to the sentence processor is the same for the two languages. We argue specifically that the constraints cannot be reduced to the effects of specificity of the question phrase, and must be attributed to two different grammatical mechanisms for the languages.Keywords. Island constraints; processing; English; Akan 1. Introduction. English and Akan differ in the range of questions that they allow. English is subject to 'island constraints', which block questions from referring (inter alia) to a position inside a complex NP (1a), an adjunct clause (2a) or an embedded question (3a). All the equivalent questions in Akan (1b, 2b and 3b) are grammatical.

Previous electrophysiological studies that have examined temporal agreement violations in (Indo-European) languages that use grammatical affixes to mark time reference, have found a Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) and/or P600 ERP components, reflecting morpho-syntactic and syntactic processing, respectively. The current study investigates the electrophysiological processing of temporal relations in an African language (Akan) that uses grammatical tone, rather than morphological inflection, for time reference. Twenty-four native speakers of Akan listened to sentences with time reference violations. Our results demonstrate that a violation of a present context by a past verb yields a P600 time-locked to the verb. There was no such effect when a past context was violated by a present verb. In conclusion, while there are similarities in both Akan and Indo-European languages, as far as the modulation of the P600 effect is concerned, the nature of this effect seems to be different for these languages.

Background: The distribution of pronouns varies cross-linguistically. This distribution has led to conflicting results in studies that investigated pronoun resolution in agrammatic indviduals. In the investigation of pronominal resolution, the linguistic phenomenon of "resumption" is understudied in agrammatism. The construction of pronominal resolution in Akan presents the opportunity to thoroughly examine resumption. Aims: To start, the present study examines the production of (pronominal) resumption in Akan focus constructions (who-questions and focused declaratives). Second, we explore the effect of grammatical tone on the processing of pronominal (resumption) since Akan is a tonal language. Methods & Procedures: First, we tested the ability to distinguish linguistic and non-linguistic tone in Akan agrammatic speakers. Then, we administered an elicitation task to five Akan agrammatic individuals, controlling for the structural variations in the realization of resumption: focused who-questions and declaratives with (i) only a resumptive pronoun, (ii) only a clause determiner, (iii) a resumptive pronoun and a clause determiner co-occurring, and (iv) neither a resumptive pronoun nor a clause determiner.Outcomes & Results: Tone discrimination .both for pitch and for lexical tone was unimpaired. The production task demonstrated that the production of resumptive pronouns and clause determiners was intact. However, the production of declarative sentences in derived word order was impaired; wh-object questions were relatively well-preserved. Conclusions: We argue that the problems with sentence production are highly selective: linguistic tones and resumption are intact but word order is impaired in non-canonical declarative sentences.