Lexical retrieval for nouns and verbs in typically developing bilectal children

Abstract

Previous evidence shows that nouns are easier for many language users to retrieve than verbs, but scant research has been conducted with children in bilectal environments (where both standard and non-standard forms of a language are spoken). This study investigates object and action naming in children who are native speakers of a nonstandard variety, Cypriot Greek (CG), but instructed scholastically in the official variety, Standard Modern Greek (SMG). Participants were typically developing Greek Cypriot preschoolers and early school-aged children who completed the Cypriot Object and Action Test (COAT). Results revealed a significant grammatical word class effect favoring nouns over verbs in Modern Greek, with a developmental change in the size of the noun-verb gap. Both age groups showed similar error patterns for both object and action targets. For action names, children produced more semantic descriptions or circumlocutions (e.g., hitting the nail for hammering), whereas omissions were the prominent error type for object names. The findings are discussed in relation to crosslinguistic evidence of grammatical word class differences using the picture naming paradigm for monolingual (pre)school-aged children.

Grammatical Class Effects Across Impaired Child and Adult Populations

“…There is a wealth of research spanning half a century on grammatical class effects exemplified by the noun–verb dissociation in language production. Evidence over the years for a noun superiority over verbs, or possibly vice versa, in spoken naming has come from a wide variety of sources such as the following, non-exhaustive list: aphasia resulting from stroke classified as either Broca's aphasia (agrammatism) or anomic aphasia (e.g., Jonkers and Bastiaanse, 1998 ; Luzzatti et al, 2002 ; Kambanaros, 2008 ; Franco et al, 2012 ; Franco, 2014 ); left subcortical lesions and concomitant anomia (Kambanaros and van Steenbrugge, 2006 ); non-focal or diffuse brain pathology such as dementia (Miozzo et al, 1994 ; Robinson et al, 1996 ; White-Devine et al, 1996 ; Bushell and Martin, 1997 ; Silveri and di Betta, 1997 ; Cappa et al, 1998 ), Alzheimer's disease (Druks et al, 2006 ), and primary progressive aphasia (Thompson et al, 2012 ); motor-related neurological diseased groups such as Parkinson's disease (see Herrera and Cuetos, 2012 for an update), progressive supranuclear palsy (Daniele et al, 2013 ), and corticobasal degeneration (Silveri and Ciccarelli, 2007 ); psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia (Kambanaros et al, 2010 ); developmental language disorders, most prominently specific language impairment, henceforth SLI (Sheng and McGregor, 2010 ; Kambanaros et al, 2013a , b ); genetic syndromes such as Williams syndrome (Thomas et al, 2006 ); bi- and multilingual individuals who show the noun–verb dissociation in all their spoken languages, such as multilingual patients with aphasia following stroke (Kambanaros and van Steenbrugge, 2006 ; Kambanaros, 2009b ; Faroqi-Shah and Waked, 2010 ), primary progressive aphasia (Hernández et al, 2008 ), multiple sclerosis (Calabria et al, 2014 ), and multilingual children with SLI (Kambanaros et al, 2013a , 2014 ); modality-specific dissociations, that is, disproportionate impairments in naming words from one grammatical class (nouns or verbs) in the spoken or written modality only (Caramazza and Hillis, 1991 ; Hillis and Caramazza, 1995 ; Rapp and Caramazza, …”

“…developmental language disorders, most prominently specific language impairment, henceforth SLI (Sheng and McGregor, 2010 ; Kambanaros et al, 2013a , b );…”

“…Moreover, major lexical-semantic variables of the noun and verb stimuli influence performance on lexical retrieval tasks for both adults with acquired language impairments (Druks et al, 2006 ; Masterson et al, 2007 ; Rodriguez-Ferreiro et al, 2009 ) and children with developmental language impairments (Kambanaros et al, 2013b ). These include word frequency, age of acquisition, imageability, and syllable length, which were also all controlled for in the research reported here.…”

“…In this article we bring together the results from studies in four clinical groups involving 89 participants in total that investigate noun/verb spoken naming on a picture-based naming task (the GOAT from Kambanaros, 2003 ). We compared each LI group with non-impaired controls in different published studies for each impairment respectively and will not focus on the results of the non-impaired groups in this article (see Kambanaros and van Steenbrugge, 2006 ; Kambanaros, 2008 ; Kambanaros et al, 2008 , 2010 , 2013b , unpublished). We are primarily interested in mapping the results of the different LI groups together to help us delineate where in the lexical system lies the level of breakdown for grammatical class words.…”

The grammatical class effect is separable from the concreteness effect in language learning

“…In previous studies, some researchers have concluded that the grammatical class effect may derive from access to, and the connections between, the lemma and lexeme levels, rather than the representation at either level per se (e.g., Hanley et al, 2013;Howard & Gatehouse, 2006;Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2015;Kambanaros et al, 2013;Kambanaros et al, 2014). Though most of these studies have used Levelt's (1989;Levelt et al, 1999) model as their theoretical framework, connectionist computational modeling has also shown that the links between meaning and form can be impacted separately from either representation (Li & Farkaš, 2002;Li, Farkaš & MacWhinney, 2004).…”