Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis

ABSTRACTThe argument structure complexity hypothesis (Thompson, 2003) was introduced to account for the verb production pattern of agrammatic patients, who show greater difficulty in producing transitive versus unergative verbs (argument number effect) and in producing unaccusative versus unergative verbs (syntactic movement effect). The present study investigates these two effects in the reading performance of a patient (GR) suffering from deep dyslexia. GR read nouns significantly better than verbs; moreover, her performance was better on unergative than on transitive verbs, whereas the comparison between unergative and unaccusative verbs did not differ significantly. Data support the extension of the argument structure complexity hypothesis to word naming and suggest that the two aspects of argument structure complexity occur at different levels within models of lexical processing.

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The Influence of Argument-Structure Complexity on the Use of Auxiliary Verbs by Children With SLI

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/jslhr.4305.1115 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 43 (5) ◽

pp. 1115-1125 ◽

Cited By ~ 36

Author(s):

Bernard G. Grela ◽

Laurence B. Leonard

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Auxiliary Verbs ◽

Structure Complexity

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Children with specific language impairment: The effect of argument-structure complexity on auditory sentence comprehension

Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics ◽

10.3109/02699206.2010.509842 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 25 (1) ◽

pp. 1-22 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Fabrizio Pizzioli ◽

Marie-Anne Schelstraete

Keyword(s):

Language Impairment ◽

Specific Language Impairment ◽

Argument Structure ◽

Sentence Comprehension ◽

Specific Language ◽

Structure Complexity

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Manual Versus Automated Narrative Analysis of Agrammatic Production Patterns: The Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis and Computerized Language Analysis

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/2017_jslhr-l-17-0185 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 61 (2) ◽

pp. 373-385 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

Chien-Ju Hsu ◽

Cynthia K. Thompson

Keyword(s):

Narrative Analysis ◽

Argument Structure ◽

Coding Systems ◽

Language Analysis ◽

Sentence Level ◽

Agrammatic Aphasia ◽

Verb Argument Structure ◽

Assessment And Treatment ◽

Healthy Control ◽

Narrative Language

Purpose The purpose of this study is to compare the outcomes of the manually coded Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis (NNLA) system, which was developed for characterizing agrammatic production patterns, and the automated Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN) system, which has recently been adopted to analyze speech samples of individuals with aphasia (a) for reliability purposes to ascertain whether they yield similar results and (b) to evaluate CLAN for its ability to automatically identify language variables important for detailing agrammatic production patterns. Method The same set of Cinderella narrative samples from 8 participants with a clinical diagnosis of agrammatic aphasia and 10 cognitively healthy control participants were transcribed and coded using NNLA and CLAN. Both coding systems were utilized to quantify and characterize speech production patterns across several microsyntactic levels: utterance, sentence, lexical, morphological, and verb argument structure levels. Agreement between the 2 coding systems was computed for variables coded by both. Results Comparison of the 2 systems revealed high agreement for most, but not all, lexical-level and morphological-level variables. However, NNLA elucidated utterance-level, sentence-level, and verb argument structure–level impairments, important for assessment and treatment of agrammatism, which are not automatically coded by CLAN. Conclusions CLAN automatically and reliably codes most lexical and morphological variables but does not automatically quantify variables important for detailing production deficits in agrammatic aphasia, although conventions for manually coding some of these variables in Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts are possible. Suggestions for combining automated programs and manual coding to capture these variables or revising CLAN to automate coding of these variables are discussed.

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Training verb argument structure production in agrammatic aphasia: Behavioral and neural recovery patterns

Cortex ◽

10.1016/j.cortex.2013.02.003 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 49 (9) ◽

pp. 2358-2376 ◽

Cited By ~ 38

Author(s):

Cynthia K. Thompson ◽

Ellyn A. Riley ◽

Dirk-Bart den Ouden ◽

Aya Meltzer-Asscher ◽

Sladjana Lukic

Keyword(s):

Argument Structure ◽

Agrammatic Aphasia ◽

Verb Argument Structure

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Grammatical Planning Units During Real-Time Sentence Production in Speakers With Agrammatic Aphasia and Healthy Speakers

Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research ◽

10.1044/2015_jslhr-l-14-0250 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 58 (4) ◽

pp. 1182-1194 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Jiyeon Lee ◽

Masaya Yoshida ◽

Cynthia K. Thompson

Keyword(s):

Real Time ◽

Argument Structure ◽

Syntactic Structure ◽

Sentence Production ◽

Sentence Structure ◽

Grammatical Structure ◽

Advanced Planning ◽

Agrammatic Aphasia ◽

Competing Models ◽

Simple Sentences

PurposeGrammatical encoding (GE) is impaired in agrammatic aphasia; however, the nature of such deficits remains unclear. We examined grammatical planning units during real-time sentence production in speakers with agrammatic aphasia and control speakers, testing two competing models of GE. We queried whether speakers with agrammatic aphasia produce sentences word by word without advanced planning or whether hierarchical syntactic structure (i.e., verb argument structure; VAS) is encoded as part of the advanced planning unit.MethodExperiment 1 examined production of sentences with a predefined structure (i.e., “The A and the B are above the C”) using eye tracking. Experiment 2 tested production of transitive and unaccusative sentences without a predefined sentence structure in a verb-priming study.ResultsIn Experiment 1, both speakers with agrammatic aphasia and young and age-matched control speakers used word-by-word strategies, selecting the first lemma (noun A) only prior to speech onset. However, in Experiment 2, unlike controls, speakers with agrammatic aphasia preplanned transitive and unaccusative sentences, encoding VAS before speech onset.ConclusionsSpeakers with agrammatic aphasia show incremental, word-by-word production for structurally simple sentences, requiring retrieval of multiple noun lemmas. However, when sentences involve functional (thematic to grammatical) structure building, advanced planning strategies (i.e., VAS encoding) are used. This early use of hierarchical syntactic information may provide a scaffold for impaired GE in agrammatism.

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Neural Mechanisms of Verb Argument Structure Processing in Agrammatic Aphasic and Healthy Age-matched Listeners

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn.2009.21334 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 22 (9) ◽

pp. 1993-2011 ◽

Cited By ~ 47

Author(s):

Cynthia K. Thompson ◽

Borna Bonakdarpour ◽

Stephen F. Fix

Keyword(s):

Sentence Processing ◽

Argument Structure ◽

Right Hemisphere ◽

Semantic Integration ◽

Neural Mechanisms ◽

Angular Gyrus ◽

Decision Task ◽

Verb Argument Structure ◽

Verb Processing ◽

Structure Complexity

Processing of lexical verbs involves automatic access to argument structure entries entailed within the verb's representation. Recent neuroimaging studies with young normal listeners suggest that this involves bilateral posterior peri-sylvian tissue, with graded activation in these regions on the basis of argument structure complexity. The aim of the present study was to examine the neural mechanisms of verb processing using fMRI in older normal volunteers and patients with stroke-induced agrammatic aphasia, a syndrome in which verb, as compared to noun, production often is selectively impaired, but verb comprehension in both on-line and off-line tasks is spared. Fourteen healthy listeners and five age-matched aphasic patients performed a lexical decision task, which examined verb processing by argument structure complexity, namely, one-argument [i.e., intransitive (v1)], two-argument [i.e., transitive (v2)], and three-argument (v3) verbs. Results for the age-matched listeners largely replicated those for younger participants studied by Thompson et al. [Thompson, C. K., Bonakdarpour, B., Fix, S. C., Blumenfeld, H. K., Parrish, T. B., Gitelman, D. R., et al. Neural correlates of verb argument structure processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1753–1767, 2007]: v3 − v1 comparisons showed activation of the angular gyrus in both hemispheres and this same heteromodal region was activated in the left hemisphere in the (v2 + v3) − v1 contrast. Similar results were derived for the agrammatic aphasic patients, however, activation was unilateral (in the right hemisphere for three participants) rather than bilateral, likely because these patients' lesions extended to the left temporo-parietal region. All performed the task with high accuracy and, despite differences in lesion site and extent, they recruited spared tissue in the same regions as healthy subjects. Consistent with psycholinguistic models of sentence processing, these findings indicate that the posterior language network is engaged for processing verb argument structure and is crucial for semantic integration of argument structure information.

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