Calling a salad a federation: An investigation of semantic jargon. Part 2—verbs

Abstract

This paper describes an individual with semantic jargon aphasia (RG) who showed interesting verb skills. In connected speech and naming tasks he accessed verbs more successfully than nouns. A range of comprehension assessments showed a particular preservation of the thematic aspects of verb meaning. For example, he could distinguish reverse role verbs, like ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ and, in a nonsense sentence comprehension task, could exploit verb argument relations to deduce who was doing what to whom. Comprehension of more perceptual aspects of verbs was less well preserved, i.e. he made semantic errors when asked to distinguish verbs which differed in manner, such as ‘slide’ and ‘crawl’. Most tellingly, these errors also occurred with verbs which had appeared in the thematic tasks. It seemed that RG retained some aspects of verb meaning but not others. In particular, their thematic information seemed more available to him than the more perceptual aspects, such as the manner of an action. A companion study (Marshall, J, et al., Journal of Neurolinguistics 9, 237–250, 1996) found a similar dissociation with nouns, in that abstract semantic features were preserved more than visual semantic features. These findings are discussed against distributed models of semantics.