Spontaneous speech in Italian agrammatic aphasia: A focus on verb production

Abstract

Background: The spontaneous speech of Italian agrammatic and non‐brain‐damaged speakers was analysed. The results are compared with those of spontaneous speech analyses of other languages. The authors would like to thank Serena de Pellegrin and Francesca Meneghello for the fundamental help during data collection, and Cristiano Vezzoni, Kostantinos Priftis, and Jason Rudd for the important remarks and suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper. Aims: The goal of this study is to describe Italian spontaneous speech data with respect to the production of verbs, and to compare these data with earlier results from Italian and other languages. Methods & Procedures: The spontaneous speech of seven Italian agrammatic speakers and ten Italian non‐brain‐damaged speakers was analysed. The corpus for analysis was collected by means of a semi‐structured interview, the description of the “Cookie Theft picture”, and the narration of “Little Red Riding Hood”. Relevant verb parameters were analysed for both groups. Verb production was qualitatively and quantitatively analysed for both groups and comparisons between the two were made. Moreover, verb tokens, and verb types were analysed, and the production of lexical verbs, copulae, reflexive verbs, and auxiliaries was studied. All produced verbs were analysed for their verb argument structure. Outcomes & Results: The results show that agrammatic speakers are impaired in verb production. They omit verbs in obligatory contexts and they make inflectional errors. Also, the diversity of the produced verbs is limited. Their production of lexical verbs, reflexive verbs, modal verbs, and auxiliaries is lower than normal, but the use of copulae does not differ from normal. The agrammatic speakers prefer simple verb‐argument structures compared to non‐brain‐damaged speakers. Conclusions: The results add data on verb production in Italian aphasic spontaneous speech. They describe some typical agrammatic speech impairments, like omission of verbs, a low diversity of lexical verbs, inflectional errors, as well as novel data about particular verb categories like reflexive verbs, and auxiliaries used in gerund mood. Furthermore, the results provide new data on verb‐argument structure in Italian aphasic spontaneous speech. It is argued that this pattern, despite the individual variance, is compatible with an impairment to grammatical encoding.