Morphosyntactic Errors Research Articles

Lexical retrieval after Arabic aphasia: Syntactic access and predictors of spoken naming

Research into anomia has been carried out in English and many Indo-European languages extensively, but not in Arabic. Previous studies have investigated predictors of successful lexical retrieval after anomia, and access to syntax during lexical retrieval. The aim of the current study is to examine impaired lexical retrieval in Arabic at two levels: predictors of lexical retrieval, and access to syntax during lexical retrieval, via checking whether syntactic cueing (using the definite article/əl-/'the' prior to nouns) facilitates noun retrieval in Arabic aphasia, with regard to naming speed and accuracy, and establishing the determinants of aphasic noun retrieval in Arabic. Three participants with anomia following CVA named 186 pictures from a published Arabic database in two conditions: bare noun condition, and determiner + noun condition. Participants' accuracy and reaction times were compared in both conditions. Furthermore, a multiple regression analysis was carried out to test the effect of psycholinguistic variables (visual complexity, name agreement, age of acquisition, imageability and other intrinsic variables) on successful lexical retrieval to determine predictors of Arabic noun retrieval after anomia. The production of the determiner + noun in picture naming facilitated spoken naming in all three participants. Nouns produced with the determiner were produced faster and more accurately than their counterparts produced without the determiner. The two participants with agrammatism produced morpho-syntactic errors in the bare noun condition, but not in the determiner + noun condition, suggesting that the determiner sets up a noun phrase frame with a slot for the noun to be filled, resulting in responses that are faster and more accurate. Age of acquisition and imageability were the only two variables that had influence across the participants. These results have theoretical and clinical implications for lexical retrieval models.

Connected speech in transient aphasias after left hemisphere resective surgery

ABSTRACTBackground: Transient aphasias are common in the first few days after resective surgery to the language-dominant hemisphere. The specific speech and language deficits that occur are related to the location of the surgical site, and may include impairments in fluency, lexical access, repetition, and comprehension. The impact of these transient aphasias on connected speech production has not previously been investigated.Aims: The goals of this study were to characterise the nature of connected speech deficits in the immediate post-surgical period, and to determine which deficits resolve completely within 1 month.Methods & Procedures: Forty-three patients undergoing resective surgery in the left (language-dominant) hemisphere participated in the study. Brief connected speech samples were obtained before surgery, and at 2–3 days post-surgery. In a subset of 24 patients (all of whom presented with aphasia in the immediate post-surgical period), follow-up samples were also obtained at 1 month post-surgery. The samples were transcribed and coded in CHAT format. Ten connected speech measures were derived from each speech sample, and were then compared by time point.Outcomes & Results: At 2–3 days post-surgery, deficits were observed in all 10 connected speech measures in comparison to pre-surgical samples: there were decreases in words per minute, words per utterance, and the use of embedded clauses, and increases in phonological errors, lexical access difficulties, morphosyntactic errors, filled pauses, false starts, and retraced sequences. The proportion of closed-class words could be perturbed in either direction. At 1 month post-surgery, 8 of the 10 connected speech measures had significantly improved, and all measures reflecting structural features (words per utterance, number of embeddings, morphosyntactic errors, proportion of words that were closed class) were equivalent to the pre-surgical time point. Subtle deficits persisted in some other measures; in particular, there were more phonological errors and lexical access difficulties than at the pre-surgical time point.Conclusions: Transient aphasias after left hemisphere surgery impacted all aspects of connected speech in the immediate post-surgical period. Most of these deficits were largely or completely resolved by 1 month post-surgery, but some subtle impairments persisted.

Error analysis of composition writing: A case of Iranian EFL learners

The aim of the present study was to investigate errors in the compositions of 30 Iranian students, both male and female and all at the intermediate level, who were selected from two language institutes, one in Rasht and the other in Bandar Anzali. The selected students were studying American English File 3, as their course book, and the researchers were their instructors. They were given a model from their course book to write a letter in reply to another letter. Thirty samples were collected, and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively following Keshavarz’s (2013) linguistic classification of errors. Findings showed that students committed different errors with different degrees of occurrence. Morphosyntactic errors were the most frequently occurring, followed by orthographic, lexicosemantic, and phonological errors respectively.

The Influence of Linguistic Proficiency on Masked Text Recognition Performance in Adults With and Without Congenital Hearing Impairment.

The authors first examined the influence of moderate to severe congenital hearing impairment (CHI) on the correctness of samples of elicited spoken language. Then, the authors used this measure as an indicator of linguistic proficiency and examined its effect on performance in language reception, independent of bottom-up auditory processing. In groups of adults with normal hearing (NH, n = 22), acquired hearing impairment (AHI, n = 22), and moderate to severe CHI (n = 21), the authors assessed linguistic proficiency by analyzing the morphosyntactic correctness of their spoken language production. Language reception skills were examined with a task for masked sentence recognition in the visual domain (text), at a readability level of 50%, using grammatically correct sentences and sentences with distorted morphosyntactic cues. The actual performance on the tasks was compared between groups. Adults with CHI made more morphosyntactic errors in spoken language production than adults with NH, while no differences were observed between the AHI and NH group. This outcome pattern sustained when comparisons were restricted to subgroups of AHI and CHI adults, matched for current auditory speech reception abilities. The data yielded no differences between groups in performance in masked text recognition of grammatically correct sentences in a test condition in which subjects could fully take advantage of their linguistic knowledge. Also, no difference between groups was found in the sensitivity to morphosyntactic distortions when processing short masked sentences, presented visually. These data showed that problems with the correct use of specific morphosyntactic knowledge in spoken language production are a long-term effect of moderate to severe CHI, independent of current auditory processing abilities. However, moderate to severe CHI generally does not impede performance in masked language reception in the visual modality, as measured in this study with short, degraded sentences. Aspects of linguistic proficiency that are affected by CHI thus do not seem to play a role in masked sentence recognition in the visual modality.

The dissociability of lexical retrieval and morphosyntactic processes for nouns and verbs: A functional and anatomoclinical study

Nouns and verbs can dissociate following brain damage, at both lexical retrieval and morphosyntactic processing levels. In order to document the range and the neural underpinnings of behavioral dissociations, twelve aphasics with disproportionate difficulty naming objects or actions were asked to apply phonologically identical morphosyntactic transformations to nouns and verbs.Two subjects with poor object naming and 2/10 with poor action naming made no morphosyntactic errors at all. Six of 10 subjects with poor action naming showed disproportionate or no morphosyntactic difficulties for verbs. Morphological errors on nouns and verbs correlated at the group level, but in individual cases a selective impairment of verb morphology was observed.Poor object and action naming with spared morphosyntax were associated with non-overlapping lesions (inferior occipitotemporal and fronto-temporal, respectively). Poor verb morphosyntax was observed with frontal-temporal lesions affecting white matter tracts deep to the insula, possibly disrupting the interaction of nodes in a fronto-temporal network.

Exploring the Utility of a School-Age Narrative Microstructure Index: Proportion of Restricted Utterances.

This research attempted to replicate Hoffman's 2009 finding that the proportion of narrative utterances with semantic or syntactic errors (i.e., ≥ 14% "restricted utterances") can differentiate school-age children with typical development from those with language impairment with a sensitivity of 83% and specificity of 88%. Methods similar to Hoffman (2009) were used to evaluate an existing set of narratives from 16 age-matched pairs of 8- to 9-year-old children, half with known language impairment. Transcripts were segmented into T-units; a code of [RESTRICTED] was assigned to any utterance with semantic or syntactic errors. A Welch's t test for independent samples revealed a statistically significant difference in the mean proportion of restricted utterances between the two groups after accommodation for an outlier with typical development. A cutoff of ≥ 14% restricted utterances replicated Hoffman's (2009) sensitivity but not specificity. Post hoc analysis of specific error types found sensitivity and specificity rates similar to Hoffman's as well as a significant difference in means when using a proportion of sentence-internal morphosyntactic errors. Results support further exploration of utterance-level error coding for diagnostic purposes and future development of this approach to meet clinical assessment needs.

Do discourse global coherence and cumulated information impact on sentence syntactic processing? An event-related brain potentials study

The present study aimed at exploring how two main primarily semantic factors of discourse comprehension, namely global coherence and amount of information cumulated across a passage, may impact on the sentential syntactic processing. This was measured in two event-related brain potentials (ERP) to grammatical (morphosyntactic) violations: anterior negativities (LAN) and posterior positivities (P600). Global coherence did not yield any significant effects on either ERP component, although it appeared advantageous to the detection of morphosyntactic errors. Anterior negativities were also unaffected by the amount of cumulated information. Accordingly, it seems that first-pass syntactic processes are unaffected by these discourse variables. In contrast, the first portion of the P600 was significantly modulated (increased) by the latter factor. This probably reflects bigger efforts to combine sentential information during situations highly demanding for working memory. Our results would suggest that processes involved in global discourse coherence appear relatively independent of the on-line syntactic and combinatorial mechanisms reflected in the LAN and the P600 components of the ERPs.

Ambiguous pronoun use in narratives of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

This study explored pronoun production and general syntactic abilities in story retelling and story generation among children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Twenty-four children diagnosed with ASD, ages 6;1–14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children ages 5;11–14;4 participated in the study. The linguistic measures for general syntax were sentence complexity and morpho-syntactic errors. The pronoun production measure was referential use of third person subject, object and possessive pronouns. The results revealed no group differences in general syntactic measures in either task. The ambiguous third person pronoun measure showed different results between the two tasks. Although there was no difference between the groups in the retelling task, children with ASD produced more ambiguous pronouns in the story-generation task than did the TD children. Interestingly, this pattern was shown for different types of pronouns, suggesting a cognitive deficit in monitoring the listener’s mental model.

Morpho-syntactic processing of Arabic plurals after aphasia: dissecting lexical meaning from morpho-syntax within word boundaries

Within the domain of inflectional morpho-syntax, differential processing of regular and irregular forms has been found in healthy speakers and in aphasia. One view assumes that irregular forms are retrieved as full entities, while regular forms are compiled on-line. An alternative view holds that a single mechanism oversees regular and irregular forms. Arabic offers an opportunity to study this phenomenon, as Arabic nouns contain a consonantal root, delivering lexical meaning, and a vocalic pattern, delivering syntactic information, such as gender and number. The aim of this study is to investigate morpho-syntactic processing of regular (sound) and irregular (broken) Arabic plurals in patients with morpho-syntactic impairment. Three participants with acquired agrammatic aphasia produced plural forms in a picture-naming task. We measured overall response accuracy, then analysed lexical errors and morpho-syntactic errors, separately. Error analysis revealed different patterns of morpho-syntactic errors depending on the type of pluralization (sound vs broken). Omissions formed the vast majority of errors in sound plurals, while substitution was the only error mechanism that occurred in broken plurals. The dissociation was statistically significant for retrieval of morpho-syntactic information (vocalic pattern) but not for lexical meaning (consonantal root), suggesting that the participants' selective impairment was an effect of the morpho-syntax of plurals. These results suggest that irregular plurals forms are stored, while regular forms are derived. The current findings support the findings from other languages and provide a new analysis technique for data from languages with non-concatenative morpho-syntax.

Rapid recovery from aphasia after infarction of Wernicke’s area

Rapid recovery from aphasia after infarction of Wernicke’s area

The Impact of Recast versus Prompts on the Grammatical Accuracy of Iranian EFL Learners’ Speech

This quasi–experimental study, conducted in English–as–a–foreign–language (EFL) classrooms at the university level in Iran, is aimed at investigating whether corrective feedback (CF) could enhance grammatical accuracy in the learners’ speech; and if it could, which type of CF is more effective than the other one. The 96 participants of the study, who were selected out of 169 freshmen students on the basis of a written pretest, took a picture description test the results of which were the criterion for their random divisions into three homogeneous groups. Whenever language learners in two experimental groups made any grammatical errors during the study, consistent CF, recast for one group and prompts for the other one, was provided for them and students in the third group, who functioned as the control group, received no CF for their morphosyntactic errors. Analysis of the results in the posttest revealed significant differences between the two CF groups and the control group on the one hand and between the recast and the prompts groups on the other hand. These results suggested that though the provision of two CF types significantly increased accuracy in the use of present forms of the verb ‘to be’ and the syntactic agreement associated with ‘–s inflection’, the remarkable outperformance of students in the prompts group over the other two groups indicated the relative efficacy of this type of CF.

Speech deterioration in an English-Shanghainese Speaker with Logopenic Variant Primary Progressive Aphasia

Speech deterioration in an English-Shanghainese Speaker with Logopenic Variant Primary Progressive Aphasia

Verb processing in Basque and French agrammatic aphasia: A “post-lexical access” deficit

Background: Verb processing is largely described across languages as being impaired in agrammatic aphasia, i.e., non-fluent aphasia with so-called “telegraphic style”. Although both lexical and morphosyntactic errors have been reported in the literature, this paper questions the claim that impaired access to verbs is a hallmark of this clinical syndrome.Aims: The present study aims to assess how agrammatic verb processing is impaired in two languages with distinct grammatical properties: Basque and French, and to test hypotheses that suggested an access deficit to verbs on this new database. Moreover, the nature of agrammatic verb errors is analysed from an interdisciplinary neuropsycholinguistic perspective according to which aphasic symptoms should be interpretable at different levels of organisation of language processing involving neural, cognitive and linguistic aspects.Methods & Procedures: A protocol built on Basque and French grammatical properties was designed in order to assess whether errors are specific to verbs, whether they are lexical or morphosyntactic and whether the verb argument structure complexity increases lexical and morphosyntactic processing difficulties, in both production and comprehension. One Basque-speaking and one French-speaking patient with agrammatism and matched controls were assessed on various oral tasks (object and action naming; sentence production and comprehension; prepositional phrase production), each of them containing 20 pictures displayed on a computer. Data were collected using a digital recorder.Outcomes & Results: Results show that agrammatic speakers produced many lexical verbs of every argument structure type. Errors were specifically morphosyntactic and increased with the verb argument structure complexity. However, verb errors were different in Basque and French due to their distinct morphosyntactic properties. In addition, whereas errors appeared in French in the use of prepositions, case morphology was well preserved in Basque, raising the issue of considering distinct neurocognitive mechanisms underlying different morphological systems.Conclusions: This paper supports the view that Basque and French agrammatic data collected from this study do not result from a lexical-access deficit. However, this interpretation depends on how one considers inflected verbs to be processed (endolexicon or exolexicon), as addressed in the discussion. In conclusion, a “post-lexical access” deficit is rather suggested, that is prior to morphophonological encoding, and affects abstract morphosyntactic operations required to implement the verb argument structure.

Handling of Morpho-syntactic Learners Errors in Tanzanian English Language Classrooms

This paper examines issues related to morpho-syntactic errors among secondary school students in Tanzanian English Language Classrooms (ELCs). Specifically, the study assesses the corrective feedback techniques that teachers use to handle their students’ morpho-syntactic errors (both written and spoken errors). The data reveal that a total of four Corrective Feedback techniques are commonly used in Tanzanian ELCs. These techniques include focused Corrective Feedback, direct Corrective Feedback, indirect Corrective Feedback and metalinguistic Corrective Feedback. On top of that, it was discovered that teachers prefer the use of indirect Corrective Feedback when they mark written assignments while explicit and recast are the most applied techniques in handling students’ oral errors.

Learners' noticing of recasts of morpho-syntactic errors: Recast types and delayed recognition

Abstract Recasts are the most commonly studied type of corrective feedback in interaction research and lately the investigation has extended to what makes recasts beneficial or unbeneficial. Expanding the investigation to the effect of different types of recasts (i.e., declarative or interrogative) on learners' noticing, the present study reports the findings of an empirical study that examined whether learners' noticing of morpho-syntactic recasts is influenced by recast type, and whether learners subsequently recognize their morpho-syntactic errors and the target-like reformulations they received during task-based interaction. Results show that learners noticed 10% of morpho-syntactic recasts and there was no significant difference by recast type. In subsequent recognition tasks, learners tended to recognize recasted forms (i.e., target-like forms) more than their errors (i.e., non-target forms).

A comparative study of morphosyntactic and discourse errors of intermediate and advanced EFL learners’ writing

The main purpose of the present paper is to identify the morphosyntactic and discourse errors of language learners at sentence and essay levels. To achieve this end, a total number of 50 Iranian university students were selected to participate in the study. Two types of test were administrated to the participants: a recognition test and a production test. In the former, the participants were asked to read 42 English sentences and identify the erroneous morphosyntactic forms; and in the latter, they were required to translate 14 Persian sentences into English and also write a two paragraph essay. Using Ferris’ (2002) model, the results indicated that there was a direct relationship between the number of errors and the participants’ level of proficiency. The results also revealed statistically significant differences between error identification and error production of both freshmen and seniors Iranian English language learners.

Syntax at Age Two: Cross-Linguistic Differences1

The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in inflectional morphology in the speech of two-year-olds. First written in 1995, and framed within the terms of contemporary syntactic theories, this article argues that cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of children's morphosyntactic errors provide important clues to the source of the errors, in particular whether they are morphological or syntactic in origin. The article takes as its starting point some striking previous findings that children's verb inflection errors are systematically correlated, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, with errors in the use of overt subjects, and with the use of syntactically complex constructions such as wh-questions. The article shows that these correlations are found in some languages but not in others, and argues that these differences are predictable, based on the verb movement and case licensing properties of individual languages. The article argues that children's errors reflect a combination of grammatical and speech production deficits.

Judgments of information structure in L2 French: Nativelike performance and the Critical Period Hypothesis

Previous studies using judgments of morphosyntactic errors have shown mixed evidence for a critical period for L2 acquisition (e.g., Birdsong & Molis, Journal of Memory and Language 44: 235–249, 2001, Johnson & Newport, Cognitive Psychology 21: 60–99, 1989). This study uses anomalies in the domain of information structure, the interface between syntactic form and pragmatic function, to shed light on the effect of age of arrival on L2 performance. In two experiments, high-proficiency L2 speakers of French were presented with sentence pairs containing either expected or anomalous information structure. Subjects judged each exchange as acceptable or unacceptable. A weak post-maturational effect of age on acceptability task performance was observed, along with a high degree of nativelike performance. These results are incompatible with the traditional notion of a critical period for second language acquisition in this domain of language, and also suggest that long periods of immersion in the L2 environment can lead to nativelike performance on tasks relating to information structure.

Targeting Prosody: A Case Study of an Adolescent

Currently, there are few published treatment studies to address prosody in clinical populations. Developing treatment protocols is challenging due to the considerable degree of heterogeneity across individuals with prosodic disturbances and the multiple aspects of prosody, voice, speech, and language that can be affected. The purpose of this article is to describe the clinical management of prosody and outcomes in an adolescent who exhibits atypical prosody, residual segmental speech errors, morphosyntactic errors, and social communicative difficulties. An explicit approach using meta-awareness and discrimination strategies was used. Positive outcomes in some targeted behaviors were noted, whereas other behaviors did not change. Outcomes are discussed relative to the treatment approach.

Evaluative expression in deaf children's written narratives

Deaf children vary in the use of and proficiency in signed language. The majority of studies on writing skills of children who are deaf did not assess deaf children's proficiency in signed language and/or grouped together deaf children with varying sign language skills. Adopting a bimodal bilingual perspective, we examined evaluative expression, an important narrative tool in both oral/written languages and signed languages, in narratives written in Dutch by deaf children who are proficient in Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) and deaf children who are low-proficient in SLN, and hearing monolingual and bilingual children. We hypothesized that deaf children who are proficient in signed language use their knowledge of evaluative expression in signed language to enrich their narratives in written Dutch, and more so than deaf children who are low-proficient in signed language and hearing monolingual and bilingual children. We examined the use of eight different evaluative devices in narratives written by deaf proficiently and low-proficiently signing children, and hearing monolingual and bilingual children. Narratives were also examined for morpho-syntactic errors and use of complex sentences. The results show that proficiently signing deaf children's narratives contain more evaluative devices that enrich the referential structure of the narrative than narratives of low-proficiently signing deaf children, and hearing bilingual and monolingual children. We propose that proficiently signing deaf children use their knowledge of SLN to convey evaluation in their written narratives, and thus have an advantage in enriching their narratives. This study also shows that in order to gain insight into deaf people's writing, it is important to take variations in sign language proficiency into account.