Verb use in aphasic and non-aphasic personal discourse: What is normal?

Abstract

Citation: Cruice, M., Pritchard, M. and Dipper, L. (2014). Verb use in aphasic and nonaphasic personal discourse: What is normal?. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 28, pp. 31-47. doi: 10.1016Neurolinguistics, 28, pp. 31-47. doi: 10. /j.jneuroling.2013 This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Heavy and light verbs were produced in equal proportions in aphasic and non-aphasic discourse Relational, material and mental verbs were prevalent in both speaker groups Verb argument structure differentiated aphasic from non-aphasic speakers' discourse Heterogeneity in both speaker groups challenges what is considered normal and typical Findings suggest multiple discourse sampling is needed in aphasia Permanent AbstractSentence and discourse analysis research provides evidence of both impaired and intact ability in verb production in aphasia, based on comparisons made within aphasic subtypes, and between aphasic and control speakers. Comparisons are complicated due to variation in elicitation tasks and genre, participant sample size, and aphasia subtype, as well as methodological differences in determining fluency. In this study, we examined the impact of aphasia on speakers' capacity to talk about their quality of life, applying three analytical methods to 58 speakers' discourse (29 predominantly fluent aphasic speakers; 29 non-aphasic speakers). Both speaker groups produced similar quantity, weight, and type of verbs, with substantial overlap in verb tokens. Relational, material and mental verbs were prevalent. Aphasic speakers had significantly lower predicate argument structure scores, and produced significantly more 0 argument structures, more [Aux+0] constructions, fewer 1 argument structures in general and fewer 1 argument structures with clausal embedding, compared to non-aphasic speakers. This study provides evidence for intact (semantic weight and type) and 2 impaired (PAS) verb production in aphasia. The heterogeneity within both participant samples challenges assumptions of normality and typicality.

Evaluating Personal Stroke Narratives from Bilingual Greek-English Immigrants with Aphasia

“…For these reasons, it seems that picture naming of nouns and verbs is not always strongly predictive of discourse performance, and that discourse sampling may actually provide a more accurate measure of word retrieval deficits [11, 32, 33]. In relation to verb semantic complexity (e.g., instrumentality), recent evidence [12] confirms previous evidence from the monolingual aphasia literature [34] and findings reported earlier by Kambanaros and colleagues [29, 31, 32] for bilingual speakers, that PWA have no significant difficulty using semantically heavy verbs (e.g., fishing, building) when describing pictures or producing personal narratives.…”

Psychometric properties of discourse measures in aphasia: acceptability, reliability, and validity

“…This was completed by 1) identifying all items which featured on a reference chain; 2) identifying which reference chain they belonged to; and 3) counting the total number of reference chains in the discourses. (Cruice, et al 2014), involving identifying the main verbs in each utterance, and the arguments around each of them. Examples of 0, 1, and 2 argument structures are given in Table 2.…”

“…Predicate argument structure was used to analyse the number of arguments a verb had. Only the internal arguments of a verb were counted (Cruice et al 2014;Edwards et al 1993;Pritchard et al 2015), to accommodate omission of the subject noun phrase which is common and acceptable in the discourse of healthy speakers (e.g., within the utterances 'we went to Fairlands Park/ and ate lunch'). This meant that verb structures were calculated as having 0, 1, and 2 internal arguments (table2.…”

“…Based on this, a mean predicate argument structure score was calculated (Cruice et al 2014;Webster et al 2007), using the calculation (total number of arguments produced/ total number of predicates produced). Non-arguments or adjuncts were removed from analysisthese are non-core semantic arguments relating to aspects such as place, time, measure, accompaniment (Black and Chiat 2003).…”

Discourse: Assessment and Therapy

“…Whitworth [56] found that speakers with aphasia used a preponderance of semantically light verbs, such as 'go' and 'make', which lack semantically rich information. Cruice et al [57] explored the language used by PWA in their responses to questions about their quality of life. Similar to the Cinderella discourses, in their quality of life discourses, PWA produced syntactically less complex sentences than healthy people.…”