Grammatical Class Effects Across Impaired Child and Adult Populations

Abstract

The aims of this study are to compare quantitative and qualitative differences for noun/verb retrieval across language-impaired groups, examine naming errors with reference to psycholinguistic models of word processing, and shed light on the nature of the naming deficit as well as determine relevant group commonalities and differences. This includes an attempt to establish whether error types differentiate language-impaired children from adults, to determine effects of psycholinguistic variables on naming accuracies, and to link the results to genetic mechanisms and/or neural circuitry in the brain. A total of 89 (language-)impaired participants took part in this report: 24 adults with acquired aphasia, 20 adults with schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, 31 adults with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, and 14 children with specific language impairment. The results of simultaneous multiple regression analyses for the errors in verb naming compared to the psycholinguistic variables for all language-impaired groups are reported and discussed in relation to models of lexical processing.This discussion will lead to considerations of genetic and/or neurobiological underpinnings: Presence of the noun–verb dissociation in focal and non-focal brain impairment make localization theories redundant, but support for wider neural network involvement.The patterns reported cannot be reduced to any one level of language processing, suggesting multiple interactions at different levels (e.g., receptive vs. expressive language abilities).Semantic-conceptual properties constrain syntactic properties with implications for phonological word form retrieval.Competition needs to be resolved at both conceptual and phonological levels of representation.Moreover, this study may provide a cross-pathological baseline that can be probed further with respect to recent suggestions concerning a reconsideration of open- vs. closed-class items, according to which verbs may actually fall into the latter rather than the standardly received former class.

Building verbs in language mixing varieties

“…GAP verbs have been associated with problems in retrieval of verb meaning and the GAP verb is a place-holder for a specific verb. This is not what we see in LVCs, where a complex and specific verb meaning is present, it is just put together differently (see Kambanaros and Grohmann [2015] for some discussion on the differences between GAP verbs and LVCs). 3…”

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

“…The current results also provide important evidence that challenges a strict concreteness-based explanation for the source of noun/verb differences in language tasks. They thus provide support, at least in part, for more grammatically-based accounts (see Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2015, for discussion; we return to this point later). This finding of a grammatical class effect that is clearly separable from concreteness has not been demonstrated previously in behavioral data from healthy adults.…”

“…However, ruling out a strict concreteness-based explanation still leaves a number of possibilities for the source(s) of the grammatical class effect, some of which the current data can address. At the conceptual/semantic level, other differences between nouns and verbs may be a factor, such as the type of representational features (perceptual versus associative; Druks, 2002;Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2015;Mätzig et al, 2009), type of semantic organization (hierarchical versus matrix-like; Black & Chiat, 2003;Druks, Masterson, Kopelman, Clare, Rose & Rai, 2006;Earles & Kersten, 2016), or number of senses (though this research has focused primarily on proficient bilinguals translating ambiguous words; e.g., Basnight-Brown & Altarriba, 2016;Boada, Sánchez-Casas, Gavilán, García-Albea & Tokowicz, 2012;Laxén & Lavaur, 2009). Although these factors may contribute to the grammatical class effect, the finding that lexical effects are less influential on receptive and comprehension-based tasks (Romani et al, 2008;Szekely et al, 2005;Vigliocco et al, 2011;Wang et al, 2010) suggests that the primary source of the grammatical class effect is NOT at the conceptual level (Howard & Gatehouse, 2006;Kambanaros, 2009;Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2015), because a conceptual-level source should lead to similar difficulties or differences across tasks and modalities.…”

“…The source of grammatical class effects is controversial (Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2015). A number of explanations have been proposed, including that verbs are more syntactically and morphologically complex than nouns (see Druks, 2002;Kauschke & Stenneken, 2008) and that verbs have broader, more context-dependent meanings than nouns (compare 'catch a ball', 'catch a cold' vs. 'throw a ball', 'bounce a ball') (e.g., Earles & Kersten, 2016;Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001;Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006).…”

“…A number of explanations have been proposed, including that verbs are more syntactically and morphologically complex than nouns (see Druks, 2002;Kauschke & Stenneken, 2008) and that verbs have broader, more context-dependent meanings than nouns (compare 'catch a ball', 'catch a cold' vs. 'throw a ball', 'bounce a ball') (e.g., Earles & Kersten, 2016;Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001;Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006). A commonly cited explanation for these differences is that nouns are inherently more concrete than verbs (e.g., Barber, Kousta, Otten & Vigliocco, 2010;Bird et al, 2000;Bogka, Masterson, Druks, Fragkioudaki, Chatziprokopiou & Economou, 2003;Bourassa & Besner, 1994;Chiarello et al, 2002;Druks, 2002;Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2015;Kauschke & Stenneken, 2008;Ma, Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, McDonough & Tardif, 2009;Mätzig et al, 2009;McDonough et al, 2011;Vigliocco et al, 2011). Although nouns and verbs vary in their concreteness (Bird et al, 2000;Kambanaros, 2009;Xu, Kang & Guo, 2016), few studies of language processing in healthy adults have considered concreteness and grammatical class simultaneously.…”