Verb and sentence processing patterns in healthy Italian participants: Insight from the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS).
Elena Barbieri, Irene Brambilla, Cynthia K Thompson and 1 others
PMID 30884288WHAT IT FOUND
Young healthy Italian speakers took longer to name and understand verbs with more arguments, and longer to produce or understand object relatives and object clefts.
The adapted NAVS task showed these speed differences, but it did not test people with aphasia.
Key findings
01Verb naming and verb comprehension took longer for three-argument verbs than for one-argument verbs.
02Producing sentences with more realized arguments took longer than producing sentences with fewer realized arguments.
03Object cleft sentences were comprehended less accurately than subject cleft sentences and passive sentences.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The participants were 21 young psychology students, mean age 22.4 and mean education 14.8, so they do not represent the age and education range of people with aphasia. The study did not include people with aphasia, so it cannot show how the test performs in clinical assessment. One participant was excluded from verb naming accuracy analyses, and some reaction-time models were underpowered. Accuracy was very high on many verb and sentence tasks. This ceiling effect makes differences hard to detect. The Italian version changed some English items, including replacing Wh-questions with cleft sentences, so results are not directly comparable to the original English NAVS. The authors state that the findings have no direct clinical application yet.
Declared interests
No funding or conflict declaration is given in the article text. The supplied journal record lists NIH extramural research support.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that the Italian NAVS works for people with aphasia. The participants were young students, not a representative aphasia group, and the authors state the findings are not immediately applicable to clinical care.