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Aspects of lexical verbs in the spontaneous speech of agrammatic and anomic patients

1996; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 5; Linguagem: Inglês

1866-9859

Roelien Bastiaanse, Roel Jonkers, U Moltmaker-Osinga,

Reading and Literacy Development

Studies on the production of verbs in aphasia are relatively rare. There are some reports about the production of lexical verbs (from now on `verbs'), mainly concerning action naming compared to object naming in different types of aphasia. Selective disorders both for verbs (McCarthy and Warrington, 1985; Caramazza and Hillis, 1991; Daniele et al., 1994) and for nouns (Zingeser and Berndt, 1988; Daniele et al., 1994) are reported in case studies. Recent group studies focus on the differences between action and object naming on the one hand and between the performance of agrammatic and anomic patients in action naming on the other (Miceli et al., 1984; Williams and Canter, 1987; Basso et al., 1990; Zingeser and Berndt, 1990; Bastiaanse, 1991; Bates et al., 1991). The general tendencies of the outcomes are that agrammatics name objects better than actions and that anomics are better in action naming than agrammatics, but that the results may depend on the kind of task. Studies on the use of verb constructions in spontaneous speech (in which we include speech elicited through the use of a cartoon strip or the `cookie theft' picture from the BDAE (Goodglass and Kaplan, 1983), or by letting the patient tell a fairy tale) are even more exceptional. These studies are restricted to the data of agrammatic patients. Miceli et al. (1983) analysed the spontaneous speech of two Italian agrammatic patients and they took the use of the verb into account. Their Case 1 (G.G.) omitted the verb more often than Case 2 (T.F.). Case 2 on the other hand often substituted the inflected form for the infinitive and left out the auxiliary. In their study of spontaneous speech of Dutch aphasic patients Vermeulen and Bastiaanse (1984) showed that anomics produced more and agrammatics fewer auxiliaries than normal controls. In 1985, Lapointe reported on the production of verb forms in agrammatic output, both in spontaneous speech and in a sentence construction task. His conclusion was that agrammatics show a strong tendency to use lessmarked verb forms, i.e. infinitive (V), V+s, V+ing, is V+ing (for English). Bastiaanse et al. (1991) showed that these results may be task-dependent (at least for Dutch). Saffran et al. (1989) found more or less the same phenomena as Lapointe (1985). Their quantitative analysis system for