Effects of Verb Bias and Syntactic Ambiguity on Reading in People with Aphasia

DeDe, Gayle (2013) Effects of Verb Bias and Syntactic Ambiguity on Reading in People with Aphasia. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

People with aphasia (PWA) often have sentence comprehension impairments. According to the Lexical Bias Hypothesis, these impairments emerge when a verb’s argument structure biases conflict with the sentence structure (Gahl, 2002). For example, PWA had more trouble understanding sentences in which the verb’s transitivity bias conflicted with the sentence structure (e.g., a transitively biased verb in an intransitive sentence) (Gahl, 2002). The present study tested the Lexical Bias Hypothesis by investigating whether PWA use verb bias differently from non-brain-damaged controls when reading syntactically ambiguous and unambiguous sentences like those in examples (1) and (2). 1. The talented photographer| accepted| (that)| the fire| could not| have been| prevented. 2. The ticket agent| admitted| (that)| the airplane| had been| late| taking off.

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