Noun-Verb Dissociations in Aphasia: Exploring Performance Patterns Across Naming and Single Word Comprehension Tasks

EasyChair Preprint 6391

Abstract

Naming deficits are the most pervasive symptoms of aphasia, with recent research suggesting that verb retrieval is particularly challenging. The extent to which this processing difficulty is specific to naming has not been ascertained, with studies showing conflicting results for noun-verb dissociations in comprehension tasks. The goal of the current study was to probe further the extent and the nature of these word class dissociations in aphasia.  Individuals with post-stroke aphasia (N = 77) completed the Russian Aphasia Test (RAT; Ivanova et al., 2021), a comprehensive standardized aphasia battery. Here, we focus specifically on the four lexical-semantic subtests: object/action naming and single-word comprehension of nouns/verbs. The target stimuli across all four noun and verb tasks were carefully matched on relevant psycholinguistic parameters, permitting direct comparison of performance within and across domains. Using linear mixed modeling we found, as expected, that performance on the naming tasks was more impaired compared to the comprehension tasks. Surprisingly, there was no significant effect of word class. That is, accuracy for both production and comprehension of nouns was similar to that of verbs, although numerically PWA performed slightly worse on the verb comprehension subtest relative to noun comprehension. Also, we investigated the interrelations between performance on these four subtests and sentence and discourse production/comprehension subtests of the RAT. Interestingly, it was verb (but not noun) processing that was related to linguistic abilities at the sentence and discourse levels, underscoring the role of the verb as a central sentence element. Thus, while we were not able to uncover reliable noun-verb dissociations in performance on naming and comprehension tasks, we did observe that specifically verb processing deficits affected higher-level linguistic impairments in aphasia.

Keyphrases: aphasia, naming, noun, single word comprehension, verb, word retrieval

@booklet{EasyChair:6391,
  author    = {Maria Ivanova and Yulia Akinina and Olga Soloukhina and Olga Dragoy},
  title     = {Noun-Verb Dissociations in Aphasia: Exploring Performance Patterns Across Naming and Single Word Comprehension Tasks},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 6391},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2021}}