Michal Biran

When is gender accessed? A study of paraphasias in Hebrew anomia

This study explored access to grammatical gender during naming in Hebrew. Studies of anomia and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOT) found that speakers of various languages (Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch) have information about the grammatical gender of words they fail to retrieve. In Hebrew, on the other hand, a TOT study found that Hebrew speakers could not provide gender information. To test access to gender in single words in Hebrew we used an implicit measure--the analysis of paraphasias of anomic patients with respect to whether or not they preserved the grammatical gender of the target word. The rationale behind this measure was that when a paraphasia is created, it generally conforms to the partial knowledge the speaker has on the target word. If speakers have gender knowledge when they fail to name, they should produce paraphasias that match their partial information, and thus match the gender of the target. Such gender preservation in paraphasias was found in German for individuals with anomia, and in Arabic, French and German for slips of the tongue. Participants were 22 Hebrew-speaking aphasic patients with phonological, semantic or conceptual anomia, who produced 532 paraphasias. None of the participants showed gender preservation in their paraphasias. Even phonological anomics, who have access to semantic information, did not preserve grammatical gender in a single-word naming task. We suggest that this difference between Hebrew and previously studied languages relates to the fact that in Hebrew bare nouns are allowed, and therefore gender is not accessed in single-word naming, whereas in languages in which a noun should be produced as a full NP (with a determiner or case-marking for example) gender has to be accessed even in single-word tasks. We propose a hypothesis according to which gender is accessed if and only if the noun is incorporated into a syntactic tree (or a chunk of a tree) that includes an agreement phrase.

From phonological paraphasias to the structure of the phonological output lexicon

This study examined how phonological information is represented and retrieved, using analysis of naming errors in anomia. We focused on questions that relate to metrical and segmental information, the types of information each of them contains, and whether they are organised in parallel or serially. Nine Hebrew-speaking individuals with anomia due to phonological output deficit named 200 pictures. A detailed analysis of the 208 phonological paraphasias they produced, at the group level and at the individual level, revealed errors preserving only segmental information, errors preserving only metrical information (number of syllables and stress pattern), and errors preserving partial information of both types. There were also errors in the order of segments. The pattern of errors indicates that metrical information and segmental information are accessed in parallel rather than serially, and are merged at a later stage in which the segments are inserted into the word form; and that segmental information includes consonants and vowels, and involves information about their identity as well as about their relative position. Information about the number of syllables seems to be retrieved together with information about the stress pattern. The analysis also showed preservation of phonological principles.

Patterns of visual dyslexia

This study reports two Hebrew-speaking individuals with acquired visual dyslexia. They made predominantly visual errors in reading, in all positions of the target words. Although both of them produced visual errors, their reading patterns crucially differed in three respects. KD had almost exclusively letter substitutions, and SF also made letter omissions, additions, letter position errors, and between-word migrations. KD had difficulties accessing abstract letter identity in single-letter tasks, and in letter naming, unlike SF, who named letters well. KD did not show lexical effects such as frequency and orthographic neighbourhood effects and produced nonword responses, whereas SF showed lexical effects, with a strong tendency to produce word responses. We suggest that these two patterns stem from two different deficits - KD has letter identity visual dyslexia, which results from a deficit in abstract letter identification in the orthographic-visual analysis system, yielding erroneous letter identities, whereas SF has visual-output dyslexia, which results from a deficit at a later stage, a stage that combines the outputs of the various functions of the orthographic-visual analyzer.

Do people with agrammatic aphasia understand verb movement

Background: Many studies report that the comprehension of sentences derived by movement of phrases is impaired in agrammatism. However, only few studies have explored the comprehension of sentences that involve a movement of the verb. In several languages, the verb can or should move to the second position of a sentence, creating VSO sentences like “Yesterday ate the girl a watermelon” from an SVO sentence. Previous studies of comprehension of verb movement either allowed the patients to use a strategy, or used grammaticality judgement tasks, which probably tap different abilities from interpretation tasks. The research was supported by a research grant from the National Institute for Psychobiology in Israel (Friedmann 2004‐5‐2b), and by the Joint German–Israeli Research Program grant (Friedmann GR‐01791). Many thanks to Ronit Szterman for her participation in the development of this experiment and to Esther Ruigendijk for her helpful comments. Aims: The present study tested the comprehension of sentences with verb movement to second position in agrammatism using a novel sentence type that prevented participants from employing strategy‐based comprehension. Comprehension was tested using sentences with verb–noun homophones and homographs. In general, the choice between the noun and the verb meaning of homophones and homographs relies on the construction of the syntactic structure of the sentence, and the syntactic role of the ambiguous word. In the current study, we used sentences in which the ambiguous word was placed at the object position, such as “Yesterday caught the bat flies in the garden” (literally transcribed into English). In order to understand whether it is a verb or a noun (whether the bat in this sentence flies, or whether it catches flies), comprehension of the relation between the moved verb and its object is required. Thus, these sentences might shed light on whether individuals with agrammatism can understand verb movement. Methods & Procedures: participants were six Hebrew‐speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia. In Experiment 1 they paraphrased auditorily presented sentences with homophones; in Experiment 2 they read aloud and then paraphrased written sentences with heterophonic homographs. Both experiments also included, in addition to the target sentences with verb movement, matched sentences with the same homographs and homophones that did not include verb movement. Experiment 1 included 51 sentences, Experiment 2 included 48 sentences per participant. Outcomes & Results: The individuals with agrammatic aphasia failed to read and paraphrase the sentences with verb movement. They either took the object to be the verb, read the moved verb incorrectly, said they did not understand the sentence, or said that there were two parts of the sentence that did not connect. Matched sentences with the same homophones and homographs without verb movement were comprehended significantly better. Normal subjects performed correctly in all conditions. Conclusions: Not only is the comprehension of movement of phrases impaired in agrammatism, but also the comprehension of sentences derived by verb movement.

Structured treatment can improve predicate argument structure impairment

Background: Complementation information is a type of lexical-syntactic information that determines which syntactic environments a verb can be inserted into. It includes information about the verb’s predicate argument structure (PAS), the thematic role of each argument, and the verb’s subcategorisation frames. Complementation information might be impaired in aphasia. Various procedures have been used in treatment studies aimed at improving the production of verbs or sentences (including the verb with its arguments); these have usually yielded an improvement in treated verbs, without generalisation to untreated verbs. Aims: In this study, we evaluated a structured treatment procedure, aimed at improving impaired PAS information, and examined whether it improved the production of verbs with their arguments in sentences. The research questions were these: (a) Will treatment improve the production of verbs with their arguments in sentences? (b) Will improvement generalise to untreated verbs? (c) Will improvement be maintained after the end of the treatment? and (d) Will improvement generalise to connected speech (in a task of telling a story in response to a series of pictures)? Methods & Procedures: Two chronic aphasic patients with impairment in PAS information participated in the study. Their complementation information, and specifically their PAS information, was assessed prior to treatment, immediately after treatment, and in follow-ups 6 weeks and 6 months after treatment. The treatment consisted of instruction and practice on the number of arguments different verbs select, and taught the participants a strategy they could use. The practice was organised hierarchically, with regard to the number of arguments a given verb requires and the amount of cueing given. Outcomes & Results: Following treatment, a significant improvement was found in the participants’ ability to produce sentences with the correct number of arguments. This improvement was generalised to untreated verbs and to connected speech and maintained for (at least) 6 months after treatment. However, neither participant showed improvement in other language skills, or even in other types of complementation information (i.e., subcategorisation frames). Conclusions: The findings suggest that structured treatment focusing on PAS information can improve the use of this specific type of information, manifested in the production of sentences including the verb with its arguments. Theoretically, the findings support the view that complementation information is represented separately from other types of language information, and they suggest that different types of complementation information might be represented separately.

Lexical-Syntactic Information in Aphasia: Verb Complementation Frames in Production and Repetition Tasks

This strategy has already been used, with success, in treatment by Shapiro and colleagues (Shapiro & Thompson, 2006; Thompson & Shapiro 1995; Thompson et al., 1996, 1997, 1998; and also Levy & Friedmann, 2009 treatment of a child with syntactic-SLI). Predicate argument structure (PAS) complexity affects verb access. In a series of response time (CMLD) studies, Shapiro et al. (1987, 1989, 1990, 1993) found the following effects: Individuals without language impairment an effect of the number of argument structure options of a verb more PAS options yield longer RTs in a secondary task. Individuals with Broca’s aphasia the same effect of verb complexity.  intact PAS. Individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia no effect of verb complexity.  PAS impairment.