Author
DiLallo, Jennifer NicoleIssue Date
2015Advisor
DeDe, Gayle
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The University of Arizona.Rights
Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.Abstract
This study investigated whether people with aphasia (PWA) retain verb transitivity biases in expressive language. Transitivity, which represents a rudimentary division among simple sentence structures, is a fundamental language feature for our characterization of people with aphasia's (PWA) basic grammatical profile. However, no studies have yet detailed PWA's transitivity biases, given limited sample sizes of PWA (which especially restrict analyses of spontaneous speech). The current study analyzed 236 transcribed interviews of PWA from AphasiaBank and found that that PWA demonstrated identical transitive biases to controls. Further, PWA produced more intransitive verbs than transitive verbs overall. In ungrammatical productions, PWA's error rates were both higher in sentence structures that conflicted with verb bias and highest when an intransitive verb was attempted in a transitive structure. Thus, these findings indicate that PWA are sensitive to verb bias and verb complexity within expressive language. These effects are consistent with previous literature concerning PWA's sensitivity to verb bias in receptive tasks and to verb complexity in verb retrieval tasks.Type
textElectronic Thesis
Degree Name
B.S.Degree Level
bachelorsDegree Program
Honors CollegeSpeech, Language, and Hearing Sciences