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Grammatical processing in impaired and unimpaired language production: a cross-linguistic study| old_uid | 12749 |
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| title | Grammatical processing in impaired and unimpaired language production: a cross-linguistic study |
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| start_date | 2013/09/06 |
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| schedule | 11h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | This study looks at the effect of frequency dominance on plural processing in English and German. Plural-dominant plural forms (e.g. ?ears?, ?mice?) are higher in frequency compared to their singular forms (?ear?, ?mouse?). In turn, singular-dominant plural forms (e.g. ?clocks?) are lower in frequency compared to their singular forms. While plural dominance effects have been found in input tasks (such as lexical decision) in healthy speakers, output tasks such as picture naming have been neglected to date as a tool of investigation. We therefore explored the effect of plural dominance by comparing picture naming performance of English and German brain-impaired speakers, using accuracy and error type as critical measures. Pictures were matched for frequency, name agreement, and visual complexity.
Using a series single case design, we investigated three English-speaking participants with aphasia with a main impairment at either the mapping of semantic information onto the word form level, or at the word form level itself. All patients showed a better naming performance for singular-dominant singulars compared to their plurals, while the plural-dominant condition did not show a significant difference between singular and plural performance. As we only investigated regular s-plurals in English, we expanded the question about the effect of dominance to a language with a more complex regular plural morphology: German. A further series single case study was carried out: four German aphasic speakers with a deficit at the word form level were given singular-dominant and plural-dominant pictures for spoken picture naming, including two regular plural types (?s and N1). All participants showed a significant difference for the singular ?dominant group (singulars > plural) and no difference for the plural-dominant group, confirming the pattern found for the English-speaking aphasic patients.
In a control experiment, 40 healthy, native English speakers named the same sets of pictures corresponding to plural-dominant and singular-dominant nouns. Naming latencies confirmed the pattern found for both groups of aphasic speakers.
Results indicate a difference in morphological processing of regular plurals, depending on the status ?dominance?, suggesting a dual-route mechanism that processes the ?s plural together with its stem as full form, or in a rule-based manner.
If time permits, I will present work in progress: We are currently carrying out German and Dutch picture naming control experiments in healthy speakers to expand the evidence for languages with a more complex plural morphology than English. |
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| responsibles | Pélissier |
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