27.57, Diss: Modern Greek, Neuroling, Syntax: Vasiliki Koukoulioti: 'Argument structure and verb inflection: a comparison between Greek-speaking patients with aphasia and semantic dementia'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-57. Mon Jan 04 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.57, Diss: Modern Greek, Neuroling, Syntax: Vasiliki Koukoulioti: 'Argument structure and verb inflection: a comparison between Greek-speaking patients with aphasia and semantic dementia'

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Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2016 14:41:51
From: Vasiliki Koukoulioti [vasiliki.koukoulioti at gmail.com]
Subject: Argument structure and verb inflection: a comparison between Greek-speaking patients with aphasia and semantic dementia

 
Institution: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki 
Program: Department of Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2013 

Author: Vasiliki Koukoulioti

Dissertation Title: Argument structure and verb inflection: a comparison
between Greek-speaking patients with aphasia and semantic
dementia 

Linguistic Field(s): Neurolinguistics
                     Syntax

Subject Language(s): Greek, Modern (ell)


Dissertation Director(s):
Stavroula Stavrakaki
Melita Stavrou
Christina Manouilidou

Dissertation Abstract:

This study addressed the question of the effect of argument structure on verb production and the interaction of verb inflection and verb argument structure in aphasia and semantic dementia. To this end, three verb classes were tested: unergative, unaccusative and transitive verbs with one object. Ten subjects with aphasia and seven with semantic dementia participated in the study. Experiment 1 (sentence completion) aimed at investigating the effect of argument structure on verb inflection. An interaction between verb class and tense was found for the aphasic group: unergative verbs were significantly more difficult to produce in past perfective than unaccusatives, whereas the opposite was found for present tense. Τhese results endorse a deficit in diacritical encoding and retrieval. With respect to the participants with semantic dementia their performance in experiment 1 showed that production of past perfective was spared, whilst production of present was impaired. This finding was
  interpreted as a deficit in encoding – and probably – perceiving the dynamic features of the imperfective aspect. Experiment 2 (sentence production) aimed at exploring the effect of argument structure on verb production. The results indicated that [-agentive] verbs, i.e. unaccusatives, are more difficult to produce than [+agentive] ones for the aphasic group. These findings are interpreted as a deficit in the processing of the lemma information. The participants with semantic dementia performed equally in all verb classes. The errors were, however, qualitatively different for each verb class: the predominant error type for unergatives involved the production of light verbs, which indicates degraded lexical conceptual structure representations. The most frequent error for unaccusatives was the production of a [+agentive] verb, which indicates lemma processing problems. Experiment 3 (tensed sentence production) showed that inflection does not have an effect on correct verb and ve
 rb argument structure production neither for the aphasic nor for the semantic dementia group. However, there were individual cases where inflection production had negative or positive influence on verb production in both groups. Moreover, unaccusative verbs were more difficult to produce when a specific form of the verb was required for the semantic dementia group, pointing to an effect of argument structure on inflection. All in all, the comparison between the two groups showed unaccusativity effect on verb production for both groups. Moreover, both groups failed to show any effect of inflection on verb and verb argument structure production at least at the group level. The groups differed, however, with respect to the degree of impairment in producing verb inflection (experiment 1), with respect to the degradation of the lexical conceptual structure representations (experiment 2) and regarding the effect of argument structure on inflection (experiment 3). These findings are discus
 sed against current theories of aphasic deficits and psycholinguistic models of sentence production.



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