A preliminary comparison of verb tense production in Spanish speakers with expressive restrictions

Abstract

Spoken verb tense use in three groups of Spanish speakers with expressive limitations, namely, children with specific language impairment, bilingual children with first language (L1) (Spanish) attrition and adults with agrammatism, was compared in order to examine the possible impact of conversational tense frequency on expressive production. Based on the notion that frequent language forms in typical discourse are preferred in contexts of expressive restrictions, we predicted that tenses with high spoken occurrence will be favoured by individuals in our expressively limited groups. The incidence of tense use by the participants was assessed in oral narratives and/or a sentence repetition task. Consistent with our prediction, the most frequent verb tenses in conversational Spanish--the present, followed by the preterite--were preferred by the participants thus supporting the proposal that a socio-cognitive factor linking discursive frequency to verb retrieval may be operating in tense preference in situations of expressive stress.

Characteristics of Swahili–English bilingual agrammatic spontaneous speech and the consequences for understanding agrammatic aphasia

“…Bybee (2007) argues that affixation (regularity) is rather more 'natural' and highly frequent in most languages, hence easier to process in general; whereas internal stem change (irregularity) is rather less 'natural', lexically arbitrary and of low type frequency, hence more difficult to master. Centeno and Anderson (2011) demonstrate that individuals with linguistic limitations (such as agrammatic speakers, children with SLI), in their oral expression, have a preference for high-frequency linguistic items over low frequency items in a language. This theory partly explains high preference for present verb forms in both languages, as well as the slightly better preserved Tense system in Swahili than in English regardless of the morphological complexity of the two languages.…”

“…While affixation has been claimed to be more 'natural' and highly frequent in most languages, and hence easier to process in general, internal stem changes (irregularity) are considered less 'natural', lexically arbitrary and of low type frequency, and hence more difficult to master (Bybee, 2007;Dressler, 1985). In situations of linguistic limitations, such as in children with SLI, bilinguals with (L1) attrition (language loss) and individuals with aphasia, high-frequency linguistic items have been found to be resistant to dissolution and are preferred in oral expression (see Centeno & Anderson, 2011).…”

An Investigation of Neural Mechanisms Underlying Verb Morphology Deficits in Aphasia

“…Agrammatism is a complex disorder, and a variety of factors may be contributing to sentence-level impairments. Authors have cited co-occurrence frequency (Duffield, 2016), word-form frequency (Faroqi-Shah & Thompson, 2004), frequency of verb use in discourse (Centeno & Anderson, 2011;Centeno & Obler, 2001), and the functions served by verb inflections (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997;Nanousi et al, 2006;Wenzlaff and Clahsen, 2004) as factors that all might influence verb inflection processing in a sentence context. These results support the possibility that persons with aphasia have difficulty in determining the correct pairing between a verb inflection and the temporal context in a sentence (Faroqi-Shah & Dickey, 2009).…”