Action 1: Morphology and Syntax

Coordinator

This action was coordinated by Prof. S. Varlokosta from the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Philology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Aims

The aims were to investigate the morphological and syntactic abilities of Greek-speaking individuals with Broca’s aphasia through off-line and on-line tasks targeting production and comprehension of speech.

Methods

Materials: Five (5) tools were used in this action to tap into the linguistic abilities of individuals with poststroke aphasia classified as Broca aphasics. The majority of tools were either sentence completion tasks or picture-based stimuli. These were as follows:

1. Functional categories associated with the Verb: Tense – Subject-Verb Agreement – Aspect

This tool was previously developed by the coordinator and has been used in published research (Varlokosta et al. 2006). It contained 96 items. Complex syntax (Tense, subject-verb Agreement, and Aspect) was measured in production and comprehension by means of a sentence completion task and a grammaticality judgment task, controlling for phrase length and number of words preceding the verb.

2. Functional categories related to the Noun: Case – Grammatical Gender

A sentence elicitation, a grammaticality judgment, and a truth value judgment task, targeting nouns marked for nominative and accusative case was used. 102 items were targeted. Grammatical gender assignment (150 items) was investigated with an on-line task in which participants heard a noun and were asked to produce the correct gender form. Gender agreement (30 items), was assessed using an off-line picture identification task.

3. Clitic constructions

For the evaluation of clitic pronoun production (36 items), a sentence completion task was used that assessed preverbal clitics (in sentences with indicative and subjunctive forms) and postverbal clitics (in imperative sentences). A grammaticality judgment task (72 items) was included as well for the evaluation of correct clitic placement across conditions. For the investigation of clitic pronoun comprehension (a) a picture-sentence matching task, where participants were asked to select a picture that corresponds to an auditorily presented sentence; and b) a verification task, where participants judged if a picture they saw corresponded to a sentence they heard or not, were used.

4. Wh-questions

Production (52 items) and comprehension (90 items) of subject and object argument questions (who, what) were assessed with an elicitation task and a comprehension task, respectively. Both referential (which-NP) and non-referential (who) argument questions were evaluated.

5. Relative clauses

Production of subject and object relative clauses was assessed via sentence completion, while comprehension was evaluated via picture selection.

Participants: 25 persons with aphasia (PWA) of which 16 (64%) were diagnosed with Broca’s aphasia participated in this action. 25 neurologically healthy controls matched to PWA on age, gender and educational level were also tested across all measures.

Analysis

Descriptive statistics was used to summarize data. Individual participants’ quantitative data from the different assessment points was compared to profile language performance across the tasks (repeated measures ANOVA). Between (group: individual vs. combination) and within subjects (time) analysis (mixed ANOVA) was used to determine syntactic and morphological deficits.