Hearing & Speech Sciences Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2776

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    AN INVESTIGATION OF NEURAL MECHANISMS UNDERLYING VERB MORPHOLOGY DEFICITS IN APHASIA
    (2019) Pifer, Madeline R; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Agrammatic aphasia is an acquired language disorder characterized by slow, non-fluent speech that include primarily content words. It is well-documented that people with agrammatism (PWA) have difficulty with production of verbs and verb morphology, but it is unknown whether these deficits occur at the single word-level, or are the result of a sentence-level impairment. The first aim of this paper is to determine the linguistic level that verb morphology impairments exist at by using magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanning to analyze neural response to two language tasks (one word-level, and one sentence-level). It has also been demonstrated that PWA benefit from a morphosemantic intervention for verb morphology deficits, but it is unknown if this therapy induces neuroplastic changes in the brain. The second aim of this paper is to determine whether or not neuroplastic changes occur after treatment, and explore the neural mechanisms by which this improvement occurs.
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    Keep it simple: Accelerating the verb learning process
    (2007-05-03) Weinberg, Stephanie Michelle; Newman, Rochelle; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    For early word learners, verbs are more difficult to learn than nouns. Previous research suggests that a simple agent of an action facilitates verb learning. The present investigation was designed to replicate this finding with real-world stimuli. Twenty-four 18-month-old English-learning children participated in one of two conditions. Children either saw a block (simple agent) or a woman (complex agent) perform a novel action named simultaneously as the action occurred. All children were tested in the Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to determine whether they learned the verb. Verb learning was not achieved in either condition; the results indicate that the block did not provide a verb learning advantage at this age. Limitations of the present study and suggestions for future research have been highlighted.