EXPLORING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VERB RETRIEVAL, AGRAMMATISM AND PAUSES

Abstract

Persons with agrammatic aphasia (a symptom of Broca’s aphasia) tend to speak at a slow rate compared to neurotypical adults and to other aphasia subtypes (Kertesz, 2007). This connection between slow rate and agrammatic aphasia is underexplored. This study examines three key variables impacting speech rate in agrammatic narratives: syntactic impairment (i.e., diagnosis of agrammatism), verb retrieval, and pauses. Specifically, forty-five narrative (Cinderella) samples (15 agrammatic aphasia, 15 anomic aphasia, and 15 controls) from AphasiaBank database (MacWinney et al., 2011) were converted into Praat TextGrids (Boersma & Weenink, 2023) with sound files, and the first five qualifying pre-verb pause durations were recorded. Additionally, the first five qualifiying pre-noun pauses were logged for comparison as well as the overall grammaticality of each targeted utterance. The results were that the number of pauses and pause duration differentiated persons with agrammatic aphasia from persons with anomic aphasia and neurotypical controls, yet verb retrieval and the syntactic well-formedness of an utterance did not significantly vary by aphasia type in utterances where verbs were successfully retrieved. Overall, this study did not lend support to the Synergistic Processing Bottleneck model for agrammatic aphasia (Faroqi-Shah, 2023).