Production of Nouns and Verbs in Picture Naming and Narrative Tasks by Chinese Speakers with Aphasia

Abstract

The processing of nouns and verbs has been an area of intense interest among psycholinguists for decades (see review by Vigliocco et al., 2010), for the obvious reasons that they are two major word classes across languages and convey the most basic information in communication. Word class effects are often reflected in response latency and/or accuracy in naming tasks. However, single word production does not resemble daily communication in which linguistic contexts may facilitate word finding. Previous studies directly comparing lexical retrieval betweennaming and narrative tasks have obtained mixed results (e.g. Berndt et al., 2002; Pashek & Tompkins, 2002), perhaps partly due to the fact that nouns and verbs were rarely matched for relevant psycholinguistic variables. This study minimized the influence of confounding factors and employed neuropsychological data to examine retrieval of nouns and verbs in confrontation namingand connected speech.