Verb processing during sentence comprehension in aphasia

Shapiro, Lewis P.; Levine, Beth A.

doi:10.1016/0093-934x(90)90100-u

Cited by 204 publications

(188 citation statements)

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“…fall) and found above-chance comprehension of all three intransitive verb types in two Broca's aphasic patients. Kim and Thompson (2000) also found that agrammatic aphasic individuals show spared access to the argument structure of verbs in grammaticality judgement tasks involving argument structure violations, and previous work by Shapiro and colleagues showed that agrammatic aphasic individuals evince normal patterns of access to verb argument structure during on-line sentence processing (Shapiro, Gordon, Hack, & Killackey, 1993;Shapiro & Levine, 1990).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

Thompson

2003

Journal of Neurolinguistics

151

118

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This study examined patterns of verb production in narrative samples of eight individuals with agrammatic aphasia and seven education-and age-matched normal subjects. Comprehension and constrained production of two types of intransitive verbs-unaccusatives whose argument structure triggers a complex syntactic derivation and unergatives that are considered syntactically simple-was also tested. Results showed that in narrative tasks a hierarchy of verb production difficulty as seen in previous studies [Aphasiology 11 (1997) 473; Brain and Language 74 (2000) 1] emerged for the aphasic participants, with a preference noted for production of verbs with a fewer number of arguments. Both normal and agrammatic subjects also showed fewer productions of unaccusative intransitive verbs in their narrative samples as compared to other verb types (supporting findings reported by Kegl [Brain and Language 50 (1995) 151]. In contrast to relatively spared comprehension of both unaccusative and unergative intransitives, the aphasic participants showed significantly greater difficulty producing unaccusatives as compared to unergatives in the constrained task. These findings suggest that deficits in accessing verbs for production are influenced by the verb's argument structure entry and led to what is referred to as the 'argument structure complexity hypothesis'. When verbs become more complex in terms of the number of associated arguments or when the argument structure entry of the verb does not directly map to its s-structure representation, production difficulty increases. KeywordsVerb production; Unaccusatives; Syntactic deficits; Agrammatism It has been well documented in the literature that some individuals with aphasia, particularly those showing deficit patterns consistent with a diagnosis of Broca's aphasia with agrammatism, evince greater difficulty producing verbs as compared to nouns (Berndt, Mitchum, Haendiges, & Sandson, 1997; Miceli, Silveri, Nocentini, & Caramazza, 1988;Miceli, Silveri, Villa, & Caramazza, 1984; Thompson et al., l995b;Zingeser & Berndt, 1990). While recent research focused on determining the nature of verb production deficits has shown that several factors may play a role in this production difficulty, including frequency and familiarity (Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000), imageability (Bird, Howard, & Franklin, 2000), and semantic factors (Breedin, Saffran, & Schwartz, 1998), the number of syntactic arguments associated with the verb and corresponding participant roles has been shown to influence verb production in several studies (Jonkers & Bastiaanse, 1996Kegl, 1995;Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000;Kim & Thompson, 2000;Kiss, 2000 Lange, Schneider, & Shapiro, 1997; Thompson, Shapiro, Li, & Schendel, 1995a). For example, Thompson et al. (1995aThompson et al. ( , 1997 found that agrammatic aphasic subjects with verb retrieval difficulty in both verb naming and in sentence production showed a pattern of verb production deficit in both tasks related to the number of arguments associated with the verb. That i...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

Thompson

2003

Journal of Neurolinguistics

151

118

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“…This finding supports others in both the sentence processing and sentence production literature. In the sentence processing literature, Shapiro, Zurif and Grimshaw (1987), Shapiro and Levine (1990), and Shapiro, Gordon, Hack, and Killackey (1993) found that when a verb is activated in the lexicon, all possible argument structure arrangements associated with that verb are also activated. We predicted that if indeed this happens, then when a verb is retrieved from the lexicon, its associated argument structure arrangements are also retrieved, and this then should facilitate grammatical sentence production.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Verb production in agrammatic aphasia: The influence of semantic class and argument structure properties on generalisation

Schneider

Thompson

2003

Aphasiology

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“…Data from sentence comprehension studies indicate that agrammatic aphasic subjects show intact linguistic representation of and on-line access to the lexicon of the verb (Shapiro, Gordon, Hack, & Killackey, 1993;Shapiro & Levine, 1990). In Shapiro et al's reaction-time studies, Broca's aphasic patients, but not fluent aphasic patients, accessed all possible argument structures of verbs in the immediate temporal vicinity of the verb during on-line sentence processing.…”

Section: Author Manuscript Author Manuscriptmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Access to the verb's lexicon also was tested using a verb comprehension task (spoken word-picture matching) and a grammaticality judgment task involving manipulation of verb-argument-structure properties via violation of strict subcategorization. It was assumed that subjects access information in the verb's lexicon during the early stage of sentence processing based on normal (Boland, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1990;Holmes, 1987;Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993) and aphasic data (Shapiro et al, 1993;Shapiro & Levine, 1990). Finally, subjects' verb naming and verb categorization were analyzed to further investigate the relationship between verb retrieval failure and argument-structure properties associated with certain verb types.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Kim¹,

Thompson²

2000

Brain and Language

266

152

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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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Verb processing during sentence comprehension in aphasia

Cited by 204 publications

References 13 publications

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

Verb production in agrammatic aphasia: The influence of semantic class and argument structure properties on generalisation

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

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