Influence of lexical and phonological variables on the production of verb tense in agrammatism.
Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah, Loubna El Ouardi, Mina Sage Nichols
PMID 42281911WHAT IT FOUND
For people with agrammatic aphasia, producing verb tenses is harder when the word has more sounds or is less common.
Verbs that also exist as nouns (like 'walk') are produced more accurately. This suggests therapy should prioritize short, frequent, homonymous verbs.
Key findings
01Verb tense accuracy is lower for words with more phonemes.
02Verbs that share a form with a common noun (homonymy) are produced more accurately.
03Errors often involve substituting the target verb with a gerund (-ing) or the bare stem.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study analyzed baseline data from participants who were also receiving treatment, though the analysis was of pre-treatment responses. Power analyses indicated low statistical power for several predictors, meaning some non-significant results might be due to sample size. The task was highly constrained (picture description with cues), so results may not generalize to spontaneous conversation.
Declared interests
No specific funding or conflict of interest declarations were provided in the text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume that regular verbs are harder than irregular verbs due to morphological complexity alone. The study found irregular verbs were more accurate, but this was likely because they had higher lexeme frequencies, confounding the regularity effect.