The quantitative analysis of agrammatic production: Procedure and data

Saffran, Eleanor M.; Berndt, Rita Sloan; Schwartz, Myrna F.

doi:10.1016/0093-934x(89)90030-8

Cited by 563 publications

(427 citation statements)

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“…In Bates, Chen, Tzeng, Li & Opie (this issue), we have replicated a selective dissociation between action naming (impaired in Broca's aphasia) and object naming (impaired in Wernicke's aphasia). Although this difference has been reported by other investigators (e.g., Miceli, Silveri, Romani & Caramazza, 1989;Saffran, Berndt & Schwartz, 1989), crosslinguistic studies have helped to eliminate the hypothesis that verb problems are a byproduct of the fact that verbs carry more grammatical marking, because the same noun/verb dissociation between Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics appears in Chinese (where there are no inflections of any kind on nouns or verbs) and Hungarian (where nouns and verbs both require extensive morphological marking -Osmán- Sági, 1990). Furthermore, a particularly interesting and informative variant of the noun/verb problem appears in our data for Chinese, a language in which many words are compounds made up of a verbal element and a nominal element (e.g., the verb "to read", which can be translated literally as LOOK-BOOK).…”

Section: This Issue) For Example Germancontrasting

confidence: 82%

Cross-linguistic research in aphasia: An overview

1991

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Most of us would like to believe that the different patterns of language breakdown observed in aphasic patients reflect the way that the human mind and brain are organized for language. However, because so much modern research on aphasia has been carried out in English, it is difficult to separate universal mechanisms from language-specific content. Crosslinguistic com-parisons permit us to disentangle these confounds, while we address one of the most important issues in cognitive neurobiology, the issue of behavioral and neural plasticity:How many different forms can the language processor take under a range of normal and abnormal conditions? We must have an answer to this question if we want to understand what the neural mechanisms responsible for language really are and really do.The nine papers presented within this special crosslinguistic issue of Brain and Language provide important new information about universal and language-specific patterns of sparing and impairment, in nonfluent "agrammatic" Broca's aphasics and in fluent patients with a diagnosis of Wernicke's aphasia. These crosslinguistic studies fall into two categories: (1) research in which language type is treated as an independent variable, by conducting the same experiment with equivalent materials in two or more different languages, and (2) research in which language type is treated as a natural experiment, using the peculiar characteristics of a single language to answer a question that would be difficult to ask in (for example) English. Studies applying one or both of these cross-linguistic methods have yielded six basic findings, summarized briefly as follows.(1) Crosslinguistic variation: First, the papers in this issue (and related crosslinguistic studies by these investigators and other research groups -see Menn and Obler, 1990) clearly demonstrate that the "same" aphasic syndromes look very different from one language to another.Indeed, language differences account for more variance than patient group differences in many of our crosslinguistic experiments to date (e.g

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Section: This Issue) For Example Germancontrasting

confidence: 82%

Cross-linguistic research in aphasia: An overview

1991

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“…Because verb movement is a language-specific operation, this relation between lexical retrieval and verb finiteness might be restricted to languages that have overt verb movement. According to our suggestions aboveproblems with verbs in spontaneous speech are caused by failure to produce moved verbs-one expects no problems in the production of finite verbs in languages without overt verb movement, but the literature shows that at least in English, such problems do exist (see, e.g., Canaha-Amatay, 1997; Saffran et al, 1989;Thompson et al, 1995). Preliminary results of the test mentioned in Bastiaanse and Van Zonneveld (1998) in Russian (Avrutin & Bastiaanse, in preparation) and the test used for the current study in English (Thompson & Bastiaanse, in preparation) show that these agrammatic Broca's aphasics do have problems with the production of finite verbs but that the discrepancy between matrix and embedded clauses is not present in those languages.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 88%

“…This phenomenon of a relatively normal production of highly frequent finite verbs has also been mentioned by Berndt, Mitchum, Haendiges, and Sandson (1997) for English-speaking agrammatics. Agrammatic Broca's aphasics are supposed to omit function words, as can be found in the most often cited definitions of telegraphic speech (Caramazza & Berndt, 1985;Saffran et al, 1989). This shows that the distinction ''function word-content word'' fails to describe the telegraphic speech of Broca's aphasics.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…1 Several studies reveal that Broca's aphasics are poor in action naming compared to object naming (Basti-aanse & Jonkers, 1998;Kohn, Lorch, & Pearson, 1989;Zingeser & Berndt, 1990), that they produce a relatively small number of verbs in spontaneous speech (Saffran, Berndt, & Schwartz, 1989;Thompson, Shapiro, & Schendel, 1995), and that the verbs that are produced often lack inflection (Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998;Saffran et al, 1989;Thompson et al, 1994). Most studies on the grammatical aspects of verb production in Broca's aphasia have been done in English, which is not the most suitable language for such research because the inflectional paradigm is very limited and there is little variation in the position of the verb.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Lexical, Morphological, and Syntactic Aspects of Verb Production in Agrammatic Aphasics

et al. 2002

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“…Results of this analysis (see Table 2) indicated production patterns consistent with a diagnosis of agrammatic aphasia (Saffran, Berndt, & Schwartz, 1989); the proportion of grammatical sentences ranged from .0 to .36 with a mean of .19. Most sentences were grammatically simple with no embeddings.…”

Section: Author Manuscript Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 95%

Patterns of Comprehension and Production of Nouns and Verbs in Agrammatism: Implications for Lexical Organization

Kim¹,

Thompson²

2000

Brain and Language

266

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This study examined the relationship between verb retrieval and verb-argument-structure properties in seven agrammatic aphasic patients using tasks requiring access to the verb's lexicon for both comprehension-and production like processes. Results showed intact comprehension of both nouns and verbs and noun naming, but impaired naming of verbs. Subjects also demonstrated near-normal performance on a grammaticality judgment task involving verb-argument-structure violations but were impaired in categorizing verbs by type (based on number of obligatory arguments). In both naming and categorization conditions, a hierarchy of verb difficulty emerged. Subjects were more accurate in naming/categorizing one-place verbs than two-place verbs and more accurate in naming/categorizing two-place verbs than three-place verbs. The pattern of selective impairment in lexical access/retrieval supports the hypothesis that one dimension of normal lexical organization is by form class. The results also suggest that no necessary relationship exists between production difficulties and comprehension of nouns/verbs in agrammatism. Further, the performance pattern noted supports the claim that verb-argumentstructure properties, an important component of the verb lexicon, influence verb production at the single-word and at the sentence level. Subjects' performance on different tasks suggests that the locus of breakdown in the verb-retrieval processes for production like tasks may be in accessing information at the lemma level of representation as per Bock's model (1995) of sentence production. Keywordsverb production in aphasia; verb categorization in aphasia; verb argument structure in aphasia; agrammatism; lexical organization in aphasia Comprehension and production of nouns and verbs have been studied in several neurological populations including aphasic patients. Researchers investigating production of nouns and verbs in aphasic patients have reported dissociations between these word classes HHS Public Access Author Manuscript Author ManuscriptAuthor ManuscriptAuthor Manuscript (Berndt, Mitchum, Haendiges, & Sandson, 1997;Miceli, Silveri, Nocentini, & Caramazza, 1988;Miceli, Silveri, Villa, & Caramazza, 1984; Zingeser & Berndt, 1990). Agrammatic aphasic patients show more difficulty naming verbs than nouns, while anomic aphasic subjects show the opposite pattern, suggesting that selective impairment in lexical representation and/or the lexical retrieval process can occur along the form class category. Miceli et al.'s (1988) Italian-speaking agrammatic aphasic subjects also showed such dissociations in comprehension, but this finding has not held up across studies (Berndt et al., 1997); most studies have shown a selective deficit in verb production, with comprehension remaining relatively unimpaired.Similar patterns also have been reported in studies examining sentence processing and production with a focus on verb-argument structure. Data from sentence comprehension studies indicate that agrammatic aphasic subjects show in...

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The quantitative analysis of agrammatic production: Procedure and data

Cited by 563 publications

References 13 publications

Cross-linguistic research in aphasia: An overview

Cross-linguistic research in aphasia: An overview

Lexical, Morphological, and Syntactic Aspects of Verb Production in Agrammatic Aphasics

Patterns of Comprehension and Production of Nouns and Verbs in Agrammatism: Implications for Lexical Organization

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