Verbal morphology in agrammatic and anomic aphasia: comparison of structured vs. narrative elicitation tasks

Lee, Jiyeon and Mack, Jennifer and Thompson, Cynthia (2012) Verbal morphology in agrammatic and anomic aphasia: comparison of structured vs. narrative elicitation tasks. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia show difficulty producing verb morphology (Arabatzi & Edwards, 2008). Various tasks ranging from spontaneous speech to constrained sentence level tasks have been used to detail these deficits and various subsets of verb inflections have been tested, resulting in mixed findings (see Lee, Milman, & Thompson, 2008 for review). In studies comparing production of finite (e.g., walks, walked) vs. nonfinite inflection forms (e.g., walking, to walk), agrammatic speakers show omission and substitution of finite tense markings in the face of relatively preserved nonfinite forms (e.g., LaPointe, 1985; Lee et al., 2008). However, little is known about verbal morphology in fluent aphasic speakers. Recently, Bastiaanse (2011) reported that fluent aphasic individuals may also experience greater difficulty with finite compared to nonfinite verbs in spontaneous speech. Despite the frequently observed verb morphology deficits in individuals with aphasia, no assessment tool is available for clinical or research purposes to quantify these deficits. In addition, little attention has been paid to the effects of different elicitation tasks on verb inflection deficits in aphasia. In this study, we examined production of verb inflection in agrammatic and anomic aphasia using two different elicitation methods: structured sentence completion and narrative production tasks. For the structured task, we used the Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection (NAVI; Lee & Thompson, experimental version), which was developed to assess both finite and nonfinite forms in English, using a sentence completion task. For the narrative task, we used the Cinderella story, one of the most commonly used tasks for eliciting narrative speech samples in aphasia research.

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