Verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia: Encoding of tense features

Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah*, Cynthia K. Thompson

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

76 Scopus citations

Abstract

Across most languages, verbs produced by agrammatic aphasic individuals are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically inappropriate inflectional affixes, such as Last night, I walking home. As per language production models, verb inflection errors in English agrammatism could arise from three potential sources: encoding the verbs' morphology based on temporal information at the conceptual level, accessing syntactic well-formedness constraints of verbal morphology, and encoding morphophonological form. We investigate these aspects of encoding verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia. Using three sentence completion experiments, it was demonstrated that production of verb inflections was impaired whenever temporal reference was involved; while morphological complexity and syntactic constraints were less likely to be the source of verb inflection errors in agrammatism. These findings are discussed in relation to current language production models.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)129-151
Number of pages23
JournalJournal of Memory and Language
Volume56
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2007

Funding

The results of this study were presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Aphasia at Vienna, Austria in 2003. This research was supported in part by an American Speech-Language Hearing Foundation award in 2001, and a Graduate Research Grant from Northwestern University in 2003 to Y.F.S., and by the National Institutes of Health (NIDCD) grant # DC01948 to CKT. We thank Matt Lambon Ralph, Rob Hartsuiker and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful suggestions in the preparation of this manuscript.

Keywords

  • Broca's aphasia
  • Inflection
  • Language
  • Models of sentence production
  • Morphology
  • Verb

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Artificial Intelligence

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