Priming Effects on Verb Production as a Function of Semantic Richness in Persons with Aphasia

Gyu Yeon Kim, Jee Eun Sung

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Objectives: The goal of this study was to explore the effect of priming verbs between individuals with aphasia and normal adults through a verb priming task. Methods: A total of 26 adults, including thirteen individuals with aphasia and thirteen normal adults with consistent age, years of education, and gender participated in this experiment. This study developed a verb priming task by referring to the task used in the research by Kim & Thompson (2004). After conducting the verb priming task, this study analyzed the priming verb computation rate and error types in each group. Results: The priming verb computation rate was significantly lower in the group of individuals with aphasia than in the normal adult group, and the priming rate of light verbs was significantly lower than that of heavy verbs. However, the correlation between group-verb type was not significant. The analysis of the error types of individuals with aphasia showed verb type conversion regardless of verb type. The ratio of major error responses was higher than correct responses in light verbs, while the ratio of correct responses was higher than major error responses in heavy verbs. Conclusion: This study implies that Korean language individuals with aphasia have more difficulties with computation in light verbs than in heavy verbs, which in a tendency also shown among normal adults and reflects the normal linguistic characteristics of the Korean language. In this study, the difficulties of light verb computation can be explained by the combination of ‘predicate noun+light verb’. The combination of ‘predicate noun+light verb’ became more difficult as nominal and proverbial characteristics of predicate nouns were added to the proverbial characteristics of light verbs.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)137-148
Number of pages12
JournalCommunication Sciences and Disorders
Volume26
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2019R1A2C1089280).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Korean Academy of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology

Keywords

  • Aphasia
  • Heavy verb
  • Light verb
  • Priming effect
  • Verb subtype

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