Grammatical category ambiguity in aphasia: Systematic versus unsystematic homographs.
Item
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Title
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Grammatical category ambiguity in aphasia: Systematic versus unsystematic homographs.
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Identifier
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AAI3047221
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identifier
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3047221
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Creator
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Goldberg, Elmera.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Robert Goldfarb
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Date
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2002
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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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Health Sciences, Speech Pathology
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Abstract
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The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of aphasia on the retrieval of nouns and verbs. The stimuli were homophonic homographs, words that are ambiguous as to grammatical category and that are orthographically and phonologically indistinguishable from one another. There was an additional variable---systematicity, which describes the relationship between the noun and verb meanings of the word, systematic words having a transparent relationship to one another, as in love /love; unsystematic words having no apparent relationship to one another, as in sink/sink. There were three tasks of increasing complexity, in each of which the target word was featured in two contexts, or in an ambiguous context. In all tasks, the subjects were asked to select the setting or usage that seemed most appropriate to them. The words were presented visually and were read aloud simultaneously by the examiner. The subjects were fluent and nonfluent aphasic adults.;The theoretical framework of the study is that nouns are processed, stored and retrieved separately from verbs, implying separate status in the mental lexicon. The hypotheses motivating this study were as follows: (1) fluent aphasic adults will tend to select the verb meaning, whereas nonfluent aphasic adults will tend to select the noun meaning; (2) the effect of frequency will prevail; (3) systematicity will have an effect, though the nature of that effect cannot be predicted; and (4) the noun meaning of the homograph will be more robust than the verb meaning. The dependent variable was verbs; the independent variables were fluency, frequency, systematicity and task.;A 2 x 3 x 2 x 3 ANOVA revealed main effects of fluency, frequency and task; there was no significant effect of systematicity. The first hypothesis was confirmed: fluent adults selected the verb meaning, whereas nonfluent aphasic adults selected the noun meaning. The second hypothesis was confirmed: the effect of frequency was significant. The third hypothesis was not confirmed: there was no effect of systematicity. The fourth hypothesis was disconfirmed: the verb meaning proved to be more robust than the noun meaning and was selected more often.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
