Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-29T05:08:15.082Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Inflection of nouns for grammatical number in spoken narratives by people with aphasia: how glass slippers challenge the rule-based approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2019

RACHEL HATCHARD Open the ORCID record for RACHEL HATCHARD [Opens in a new window]  and
ELENA LIEVEN
RACHEL HATCHARD*
Affiliation:
Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom
ELENA LIEVEN
Affiliation:
Division of Human Communication, Development and Hearing, School of Health Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
*
†Address for correspondence: Rachel Hatchard, Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, 3 Elms Road, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom. e-mail: r.hatchard@bham.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Inflection impairments are commonly noted in aphasia, particularly non-fluent variants, where descriptions of such difficulties often focus on inflection omission. This aligns with rule-based theory, in which inflected forms should be more difficult to produce than their uninflected counterparts. Recent studies address noun inflection for number and potential effects of the relative frequency of singular and plural forms (dominance effects). However, none examine number errors qualitatively or in spontaneous speech. We present quantitative and qualitative analyses of such errors in nouns produced by twelve people with aphasia in spoken Cinderella narratives, examining: error rate; error types and nouns involved; relationship between error production and dominance; and speakers’ consistency with error production and flexibility in varying the noun forms concerned. Twelve unimpaired speakers provide comparison data. While error rates were low, arguably more important is error type. Singularisation and pluralisation errors were observed, all on regular nouns and involving production of the dominant form. The pluralisation errors, all occurring on references to Cinderella’s glass slipper, arguably challenge rule-based predictions that the singular is easier to retrieve than the plural. We suggest constructivist, usage-based theory as a promising framework to characterise such productions. Implications for aphasiology and clinical practice are also discussed.

Keywords

aphasiaconstructivistusage-based approachconstruction grammarnoun inflectionfrequency effectsgrammatical number
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2019 , pp. 341 - 372
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

We wish to thank all participants for generously donating their time and energy to this study. We are also grateful to Ruth Herbert for suggestions about data collection, Janet Webster for kindly sharing the data from the unimpaired speakers, Bodo Winter for advice on specific analytical points, and Gareth Carrol, Jack Grieve, Nicholas Groom, Ruth Herbert, and Marcus Perlman for comments on earlier drafts. This work was partly funded by the University of Sheffield’s Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health (Faculty Prize Scholarship). Elena Lieven’s research is supported by a grant to the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD: <www.lucid.ac.uk>). The support of the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/L008955/1] is gratefully acknowledged. Part of this work was completed for the first author’s PhD at the University of Sheffield.

References

references

Alegre, M. & Gordon, P. (1999). Frequency effects and the representational status of regular inflections. Journal of Memory and Language 40(1), 41–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ambridge, B., Kidd, E., Rowland, C. F. & Theakston, A. L. (2015). The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 42(2), 239–273.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ambridge, B. & Lieven, E. V. M. (2011). Child language acquisition: contrasting theoretical approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnon, I. & Clark, E. V. (2011). Why brush your teeth is better than teeth – children’s word production is facilitated in familiar sentence-frames. Language Learning and Development 7(2), 107–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnon, I. & Snider, N. (2010). More than words: frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language 62(1), 67–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
ASHA (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association) (2018). ASHA glossary: Broca’s aphasia. Retrieved from <http://www.asha.org/Glossary/Brocas-Aphasia/>..>Google Scholar
Auclair-Ouellet, N., Pythoud, P., Koenig-Bruhin, M. & Fossard, M. (2019). Inflectional morphology in fluent aphasia: a case study in a highly inflected language. Language and Speech 62(2), 250–259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Audacity Team (2013–2014). Audacity(R): free audio editor and recorder, version 2.0.5 [Computer application]. Retrieved from <https://audacityteam.org/>..>Google Scholar
Baayen, R. H., Dijkstra, T. & Schreuder, R. (1997). Singulars and plurals in Dutch: evidence for a parallel dual-route model. Journal of Memory and Language 37(1), 94–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bannard, C. & Matthews, D. (2008). Stored word sequences in language learning: the effect of familiarity on children’s repetition of four-word combinations. Psychological Science 19(3), 241–248.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bastiaanse, R., Rispens, J. E. & van Zonneveld, R. (2000). Verb retrieval, verb inflection and negation. In Bastiaanse, R. & Grodzinsky, Y. (eds.), Grammatical disorders in aphasia (pp. 171–190). London: Whurr.Google Scholar
Berndt, R. S. (2015). Sentence production. In Rapp, B. (ed.), Handbook of cognitive neuropsychology: what deficits reveal about the human mind (pp. 375–396). New York: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Biedermann, B., Beyersmann, E., Mason, C., Machleb, F., Moormann, M. & Lorenz, A. (2018). Production of German –n plurals in aphasia: effects of dominance and predictability. Aphasiology 32(9), 1087–1112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biedermann, B., Beyersmann, E., Mason, C. & Nickels, L. (2013). Does plural dominance play a role in spoken picture naming? A comparison of unimpaired and impaired speakers. Journal of Neurolinguistics 26(6), 712–736.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Biedermann, B., Lorenz, A., Beyersmann, E. & Nickels, L. (2012). The influence of plural dominance in aphasic word production. Aphasiology 26(8), 985–1004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boye, K., Bastiaanse, R. & Harder, P. (2017). Agrammatic aphasia in a usage-based theory of grammar. Paper presented at the 14th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, University of Tartu, Estonia. Retrieved from <https://sisu.ut.ee/sites/default/files/proovin/files/boye.pdf>..>Google Scholar
Boyle, M. (2014). Test–retest stability of word retrieval in aphasic discourse. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 57(3), 966–978.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Braber, N., Patterson, K., Ellis, K. & Lambon Ralph, M. A. (2005). The relationship between phonological and morphological deficits in Broca’s aphasia: further evidence from errors in verb inflection. Brain and Language 92(3), 278–287.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Butterworth, B. (1983). Lexical representations. In Butterworth, B. (ed.), Language production (pp. 257–294). London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. L. & Beckner, C. (2010). Usage-based theory. In Heine, B. & Narrog, H. (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis (pp. 827–856). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, J. & Scheibmann, J. (1999). The effect of usage on degrees of constituency: the reduction of don’t in English. Linguistics 37(4), 575–596.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Crepaldi, D., Aggujaro, S., Arduino, L. S., Zonca, G., Ghirardi, G., Inzaghi, M. G., Colombo, M., Chierchia, G. & Luzzatti, C. (2006). Noun–verb dissociation in aphasia: the role of imageability and functional locus of the lesion. Neuropsychologia 44(1), 73–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davies, Mark (2004–). BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). Retrieved from <http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/>.Google Scholar
Dell, G. S., Schwartz, M. F., Martin, N., Saffran, E. M. & Gagnon, D. A. (1997). Lexical access in aphasic and nonaphasic speakers. Psychological Review 104(4), 801–838.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Edwards, S. (2002). Grammar and fluent aphasia. In Fava, E. (ed.), Clinical linguistics: theory and applications in pathology and therapy (pp. 249–266). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. K. (2004). Semantic, lexical, and phonological influences on the production of verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia. Brain and Language 89(3), 484–498.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Faroqi-Shah, Y. & Thompson, C. K. (2007). Verb inflections in agrammatic aphasia: encoding of tense features. Journal of Memory and Language 56(1), 129–151.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferguson, A. & Armstrong, E. (2009). Researching communication disorders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedmann, N. (2002). Question production in agrammatism: the Tree Pruning Hypothesis. Brain and Language 80(2), 160–187.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Friedmann, N. & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language 56(3), 397–425.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gahl, S. (2002). Lexical biases in aphasic sentence comprehension: an experimental and corpus linguistic study. Aphasiology 16(12), 1173–1198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gahl, S., Menn, L., Ramsberger, G., Jurafsky, D. S., Elder, E., Rewega, M. & Holland, A. L. (2003). Syntactic frame and verb bias in aphasia: plausibility judgments of undergoer-subject sentences. Brain and Cognition 53(2), 223–228.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: a construction grammar approach to argument structure . Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: the nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Grodzinsky, Y. (2000). The neurology of syntax: language use without Broca’s area. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 23(1), 1–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hatchard, R. (2015). A construction-based approach to spoken language in aphasia. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Sheffield. Available from <http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10385/>..>Google Scholar
Hatchard, R. (2019). Usage-based approach to language acquisition. In Damico, J. S. & Ball, M. J. (eds.), The SAGE encyclopedia of human communication sciences and disorders (pp. 2020–2023). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Hatchard, R., Wilkinson, R. & Herbert, R. (2013). The application of Construction Grammar to language in aphasia. Paper presented at the 12th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Retrieved from <https://sites.ualberta.ca/∼iclc2013/presentations/2013-07-15-10-38-09-rachel_hatchard.pdf>..>Google Scholar
Herbert, R., Haw, C., Brown, C., Gregory, E. & Brumfitt, S. (2012). Accessible information guidelines. Stroke Association. Retrieved from <https://www.stroke.org.uk/sites/default/files/accessible_information_guidelines.pdf1_.pdf>Google Scholar
Ishkhanyan, B., Sahraoui, H., Harder, P., Mogensen, J. & Boye, K. (2017). Grammatical and lexical pronoun dissociation in French speakers with agrammatic aphasia: a usage-based account and REF-based hypothesis. Journal of Neurolinguistics 44, 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kertesz, A. (1982). Western Aphasia Battery. New York: Grune & Stratton.Google Scholar
Laiacona, M. & Caramazza, A. (2004). The noun/verb dissociation in language production: varieties of causes. Cognitive Neuropsychology 21(2), 103–123.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Levelt, W. J. M., Roelofs, A. & Meyer, A. S. (1999). A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(1), 1–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lorenz, A. & Biedermann, B. (2015). Production of plural nouns in German: evidence from non-fluent aphasia. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30(7), 796–815.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lum, C., Cox, R. & Kilgour, J. (2012). PATSy: a database of clinical cases for teaching and research. Universities of Sussex and Edinburgh. Retrieved from <http://www.patsy.ac.uk>.Google Scholar
Lum, C., Cox, R., Kilgour, J., Morris, J. & Tobin, R. (1999). PATSy: a multimedia distributed web-base resource for aphasiologists in research and education. Aphasiology 13(7), 573–579.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marcus, G. F. (1995). Children’s overregularization of English plurals: a quantitative analysis. Journal of Child Language 22(2), 447–459.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Menn, L. & Duffield, C. J. (2013). Aphasias and theories of linguistic representation: representing frequency, hierarchy, constructions, and sequential structure. WIREs: Cognitive Science 4(6), 651–663.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nickels, L., Biedermann, B., Fieder, N. & Schiller, N. O. (2015). The lexical-syntactic representation of number. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 30(3), 287–304.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rapp, B. & Caramazza, A. (2002). Selective difficulties with spoken nouns and written verbs: a single case study. Journal of Neurolinguistics 15(3/5), 373–402.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saffran, E. M., Berndt, R. S. & Schwartz, M. F. (1989). The quantitative analysis of agrammatic production: procedure and data. Brain and Language 37(3), 440–479.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shapiro, K. & Caramazza, A. (2003). Grammatical processing of nouns and verbs in left frontal cortex? Neuropsychologia 41(9), 1189–1198.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Swinburn, K., Porter, G. & Howard, D. (2004). Comprehensive aphasia test. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: a usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (2015). The usage-based theory of language acquisition. In Bavin, E. (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of child language (2nd ed.) (pp. 89–106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webster, J., Franklin, S. & Howard, D. (2001). An investigation of the interaction between thematic and phrasal structure in nonfluent agrammatic subjects. Brain and Language 78(2), 197–211.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Webster, J., Franklin, S. & Howard, D. (2007). An analysis of thematic and phrasal structure in people with aphasia: What more can we learn from the story of Cinderella? Journal of Neurolinguistics 20(5), 363–394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Whitworth, A., Webster, J. & Howard, D.. (2014.) A cognitive neuropsychological approach to assessment and intervention in aphasia: a clinician’s guide (2nd ed.). Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Wood, J. M. (2007). Understanding and computing Cohen’s kappa: a tutorial. WebPsychEmpiricist. Retrieved from <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6929/0bf0a8b0ad8d1d1a8a2dfd929012941a7158.pdf?_ga=2.18474225.958053543.1566562570-386425332.1566562570>.Google Scholar
Zimmerer, V. C., Newman, L., Thomson, R., Coleman, M. & Varley, R. A. (2018). Automated analysis of language production in aphasia and right-hemisphere damage: frequency and collocation strength. Aphasiology 32(11), 1267–1283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Hatchard and Elena supplementary material

Hatchard and Elena supplementary material 1

Download Hatchard and Elena supplementary material(File)
File 43.9 KB
Supplementary material: File

Hatchard and Elena supplementary material

Hatchard and Elena supplementary material 2

Download Hatchard and Elena supplementary material(File)
File 190.6 KB