1. Task 1: Single-Word Naming (cf. Thompson 2003) Targets were 15 unaccusative and 10 unergative verbs, balanced for lexical frequency across classes. Prediction: Patients will name unergative verbs with greater accuracy than unaccusative verbs. Task 2: Sentence Production (cf. Lee & Thompson 2004) Pictures from Task 1 were presented together with the bare stem of the target verb in spoken and written form. Prediction: Patients will produce significantly fewer errors affecting argument structure in unergative sentences. Task 3: Auditory Sentence-Picture Matching Subjects chose one of two pictures to match a spoken sentence. As a baseline for movement effects, simple transitive verbs were presented in active and passive conditions. Alternating unaccusative verbs were presented in transitive and intransitive conditions. Prediction: Patients will exhibit decreased comprehension of movement relative to non- movement constructions. The Unaccusative Construction in Aphasia: Implications for the Representation of Syntactic Movement Tara McAllister 1,3, Gloria Waters 1, David Caplan 2, Asaf Bachrach 3 (1) Department of Health Sciences, Sargent College, Boston University (2) Neuropsychology Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital (3) Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Introduction Recent studies have reported impairment in agrammatic aphasic production of unaccusative verbs, which contain a passive-like chain of movement. A theory that links comprehension deficits in aphasia to representation of movement chains would also predict a deficit in comprehension of unaccusatives. We tested the hypothesis that aphasic patients have specific deficits affecting movement-related structures by examining the production and comprehension of unaccusative and non-movement stimuli in nine adults with aphasia and matched controls. Unaccusatives in Aphasia Study DesignResultsConclusion Methods References The Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter, 1978): Intransitive verbs fall into two classes based on the thematic role assigned to the subject. Subject = Agent: Unergative. Subject = Theme: Unaccusative. Unaccusative verbs (e.g. fall, bounce, die) involve a chain of object-to-subject movement, as observed in the passive. Evidence from the resultative construction: a.Unaccusative: The river i froze t i solid. b.Unergative: The boy i laughed *(himself i ) silly. Several studies have described unaccusative production deficits in agrammatic aphasia. Thompson (2003), Lee & Thompson (2004): Unaccusative verbs are produced less accurately than frequency-matched unergative verbs in picture-naming and sentence production tasks. Bastiaanse & van Zonneveld (2005): In sentence production, unaccusative verbs of alternating transitivity are produced more accurately in the transitive (non-movement) frame. A comprehension deficit has not been documented, but existing studies are limited. Do these findings point to a representational deficit affecting movement constructions? If so, affected individuals should show an unaccusative deficit across tasks and modalities; non-aphasic individuals should not. Goals of this study: (1) Devise a more sensitive test for comprehension of unaccusatives. (2) Assess both comprehension and production within a single group to look for cross-modal effects. 9 subjects with aphasia (5 males) Mean age: 62 years Mean years of education: 16 Inclusionary criteria were history of CVA, diagnosis of aphasia, and native English speaker status. Subjects were not included or excluded based on aphasic syndrome, lesion location, or severity. Subjects tested exhibited relatively mild, fluent aphasia. No subject fit the profile of agrammatism in production. 12 age- and education-matched controls (5 males) a.[-Movement] Condition: “The boy is choking the girl.” b. [+Movement] Condition: “The boy is choking.” a.[-Movement] Condition: “The teacher is poking the girl.” b. [+Movement] Condition: “The teacher is being poked by the girl.” a.Control Condition: “crawl” (unerg.) b. Experimental Condition: “bounce” (unacc.) Accuracy data were analyzed using a repeated- measures ANOVA with the factors of Group and Verb Type (Tasks 1 and 2) or Group, Verb Type, and Movement Condition (Task 3). The difference in accuracy between controls and patients reached significance in only one task. Reaction time data, collected for Task 3 only, revealed that patients responded significantly more slowly than controls. Across all tasks, there was a main effect of verb type. Unaccusatives were both produced and comprehended with lower accuracy than non- movement constructions. There was no significant interaction between group and verb type: the disparity between movement and non-movement constructions was present in controls as well as patients. Chi-square analyses were also used to investigate individual patterns of performance across tasks. The presence of a movement/non-movement gap on one task was not found to predict similar performance on any other task. An exception was subject BD (moderate fluent aphasia with moderately impaired comprehension), who exhibited a movement deficit across tasks and modalities: The transitive-intransitive unaccusative difference did not reach significance, but additional testing strongly suggested that BD used an extralinguistic strategy for unaccusative comprehension. Percent correct, production Percent correct, comprehension As predicted, unaccusative verbs were associated with decreased performance across production and comprehension tasks. Unexpectedly, though, this pattern was observed in age-matched controls as well as patients with aphasia, with no interaction of group and verb type. The results of this experiment did not point to an aphasia-specific deficit in the representation of movement chains. Instead, these results supported the hypothesis that deficits in aphasic comprehension and production are at least in part a reflection of reduced processing capacity. However, these findings are not incompatible with the claim of a representational deficit affecting movement in aphasia. A single case study (BD) suggested that structure-specific movement deficits may be characteristic of a subset of individuals with aphasia. Patients tested here mostly had mild, fluent aphasia, while claims about movement deficits are frequently specific to agrammatic aphasia. Further investigation with a more targeted sample of the aphasic population is indicated. Bastiaanse, R., & van Zonneveld, R. (2005). Sentence production with verbs of alternating transitivity in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 18, 57-66. Caplan, D., Waters, G., DeDe, G., Michaud, J., & Reddy, A. (2007). A Study of Syntactic Processing in Aphasia I: Behavioral (psycholinguistic) aspects. Brain and Language, 101, 103-50. Lee, M., & Thompson, C. (2004). Agrammatic aphasic production and comprehension of unaccusative verbs in sentence contexts. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 17, 315- 330. Perlmutter, D. (1978). Impersonal Passives and the Unaccusative Hypothesis. In Papers from the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 157-189). University of California, Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistic Society. Thompson, C. (2003). Unaccusative verb production in agrammatic aphasia: The argument structure complexity hypothesis. Journal of Neurolinguistics,16, 151-167. This research was supported by NIDCD grant DC 00942 to David Caplan. Reaction Time Accuracy