Tense-mood-aspect frequency, verb-form regularity and context-governed choice in agrammatism: Evidence from Spanish ser and estar
Item
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Title
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Tense-mood-aspect frequency, verb-form regularity and context-governed choice in agrammatism: Evidence from Spanish ser and estar
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:b96506959902:10776
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identifier
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11102
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Creator
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O'Connor Wells, Barbara A.,
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Contributor
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Loraine K. Obler
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Speech therapy | Agrammatism | Context-Governed Choice | Spanish Ser and Estar | Tense-Mood-Aspect Frequency | Verb-Form Regularity
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Abstract
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This dissertation study examined the effects of tense-mood-aspect frequency (TMA Frequency), verb-form regularity (VF Regularity) and the semantics of context-governed choice (CGC) on verb production in agrammatism- an acquired language disorder resulting from brain damage (e.g., stroke), in which speech output is produced in a slow and labored fashion and utterances are short in length and missing crucial syntactic and morphological features of the language. Although numerous factors have been proposed to contribute to agrammatism and its cross-linguistic manifestation, none have been able to fully explain this disorder. We chose the Spanish language, and its dual-copula system, to test these three factors that have been nominated as important and likely candidates to explain the disorder of agrammatism. The Spanish language is a useful resource to examine these factors, in that it possesses two copula verbs: ser and estar (be in English), which differ semantically (depending on the context of the sentence), as well as in frequency and form regularity.;Eighteen Spanish-speaking individuals (six participants with agrammatism, twelve control participants) participated in a sentence-completion task to examine the influence of the three previously-mentioned factors on verb production in agrammatism. The results indicated that the factors of TMA Frequency and VF Regularity facilitated copula verb production in Spanish agrammatism, whereas CGC did not.;For our participants with agrammatism, the results revealed the following: (1) they produced the present tense of the copula verbs more correctly than the imperfect past tense, (2) they were more accurate on the more regular copula verb (i.e., estar) than the more irregular one (i.e., ser), (3) they produced rule-governed uses of the copula verbs more accurately than CGC uses and (4) when allowed a copula choice, three of them strongly preferred estar, while the remaining three preferred ser..;The error analysis showed further that both groups were heterogenous in their overall error patterns. A feature-distance analysis revealed that both the control group and the agrammatic group typically produced errors that were off by one feature during the task. However, they diverged in their pattern of errors (i.e., the most common error pattern was " ser for estar" errors for the control group, with the opposite pattern ("estar for ser" errors) for the agrammatic group).;This study furthers our understanding of copula verb production in agrammatism, since cross-language studies have demonstrated its vulnerability to aphasia in languages where only one copula verb exists (Menn & Obler, 1990) and adds to the growing body of literature on how the factors of TMA Frequency and VF Regularity, but not CGC, contribute to verb production in agrammatism.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Speech and Hearing Sciences
