Title: "An investigation of phonological encoding of nouns and verbs"
Speaker: Laura Friedman, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
Date: Wednesday, February 26; 12-1 PM
Room: LeFrak Hall Room 0135
Abstract:
Previous studies have found that verbs are named less accurately and more slowly than nouns in neurologically healthy populations, but there is no clear evidence on why this occurs. Additionally, people with aphasia often have a verb deficit, and the exact locus of this deficit is unknown. Given these gaps in knowledge, this study investigated the time course of phonological encoding of verbs relative to nouns in a neurologically healthy population and three participants with aphasia using a phoneme monitoring paradigm which involved silent picture naming. The neurologically healthy population showed slower encoding for verbs relative to nouns and faster reaction times for word-initial phonemes compared to later occurring phonemes. The results from the people with aphasia fail to support that the locus of the verb deficit is at the level of phonological encoding, although the results are preliminary given the small sample size. Overall, this study elucidates the differences between noun and verb retrieval from pictures and highlights the complex nature of word retrieval deficits in people with aphasia.
