Verb argument structure in narrative speech: Mining the AphasiaBank
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1
University of South Carolina, Dept. of Communication Sciences and Disorders, United States
Introduction
Verbs are central to language production and comprehension because they determine the structure of the sentence and reflect ‘who is doing what to whom’ more than any other word class. Besides generally demonstrating impaired verb processing, individuals with aphasia (PWA) are specifically affected by the complexity of verbs, for example in terms of the number and type of arguments (participant roles) that a verb commonly takes (VAS; Thompson, 2003).
Verb complexity may not only be quantified in terms of its number of arguments, but also in terms of other characteristics. For example, the number of different syntactic types of units that may complement the verb, its subcategorization options, also likely contribute to complexity (the verb ‘to discover’ has two subcategorization options: it can be complemented by a noun phrase, ‘John discovered the story’, or by a finite clause, ‘John discovered that the story was real’). Several studies suggest that subcategorization information is stored as part of a verb’s lexical representation (Roesler et al., 1993; Rubin et al., 1996; Shetreet et al., 2007).
Effects of VAS complexity in aphasia have mainly been demonstrated in highly constrained tasks such as picture naming, picture-based sentence production, or lexical decision (Kim & Thompson, 2000), but there is little data on whether the effects hold in spontaneous speech production. The present study aimed to address this by using the AphasiaBank database (http://talkbank.org/AphasiaBank) to investigate VAS characteristics of verbs used in narrative speech by individuals with different types of aphasia.
Method
The Aphasia Bank is an online database that includes narrative speech samples based on a retelling of the Cinderella story, collected from individuals with and without aphasia. The present study includes data from 159 healthy control participants and 173 PWA (69 anomic, 48 Broca’s, 38 conduction, 18 Wernicke’s). The complexity of each verb in the samples was characterized in terms of its number of subcategorization options (#SO) and number of arguments in the main subcategorization option (#A), based on entries in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.
We used linear regression modeling to investigate effects of participant group on the #SO and #A of selected verbs, separately, along with the verb-specific factors ‘length’, ‘frequency’ and ‘imageability’.
Results
Numerically, the PWA appear to use verbs of higher complexity, in terms of #SO and #A, than control speakers. However, when accounting for other linguistic variables, no differences in VAS properties are found between verbs used by participant groups: no effects in the number of subcategorization options (F(4,562) = .186, p = .946) nor in the number of transitive verbs (F(4,562) = 1.319, p = .261). Compared to the control speakers, the speakers with aphasia do use more frequent verbs (F(4,562) = 17.634, p < .001) as well as shorter verbs (F(4,562) = 2.369, p = .052).
Conclusion
These results show that verb retrieval itself is not limited by argument structure complexity in speakers with aphasia, suggesting that problems with VAS may occur ‘down the line’, i.e. with the use of VAS in sentence production and/or processing.
Acknowledgements
This submission is part of a symposium proposal: "The rise of big-data in aphasiology: an opportunity for theory development"
References
Kim, M., & C. K. Thompson. (2000). Patterns of Comprehension and Production of Nouns and Verbs in agrammatism: Implications for Lexical Organization. Brain and Language, 74(1), 1-25.
Roesler, F., Friederici, A. D., Puetz, P., & Hahne, A. (1993). Event-related brain potentials while encountering semantic and syntactic constraint violations. J Cogn Neurosci, 5, 345-362.
Rubin, S. S., Newhoff, M., Peach, R. K., & Shapiro, L. P. (1996). Electrophysiological indices of lexical processing: the effects of verb complexity and age. J Speech Lang Hear Res, 39, 1071--1080.
Shetreet, E., Palti, D., Friedmann, N., & Hadar, U. (2007): Cortical representation of verb processing in sentence comprehension: Number of complements, subcategorization and thematic frames. Cereb Cortex, 17, 1958-1969
Thompson, C. K. (2003). Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: the argument structure complexity hypothesis. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 16, 151-167.
Keywords:
Aphasia,
Verb argument structure,
database research,
Narrative speech,
discourse
Conference:
Academy of Aphasia 53rd Annual Meeting, Tucson, United States, 18 Oct - 20 Oct, 2015.
Presentation Type:
symposium
Topic:
Not student first author
Citation:
Den Ouden
DB,
Malyutina
S and
Richardson
JD
(2015). Verb argument structure in narrative speech: Mining the AphasiaBank.
Front. Psychol.
Conference Abstract:
Academy of Aphasia 53rd Annual Meeting.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2015.65.00085
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Received:
24 Apr 2015;
Published Online:
24 Sep 2015.
*
Correspondence:
PhD. Dirk B Den Ouden, University of South Carolina, Dept. of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Columbia, South Carolina, 29208, United States, denouden@sc.edu