Compound nouns in spoken language production by speakers with aphasia compared to neurologically healthy speakers: An exploratory study

Abstract

Compounds are words that are made up of at least two other words (lexemes), featuring lexical and syntactic characteristics and thus particularly interesting for the study of language processing. Most studies of compounds and language processing have been based on data from experimental single word production and comprehension tasks. To enhance the ecological validity of morphological processing research, data from other contexts, such as discourse production, need to be considered. This study investigates the production of nominal compounds in semi-spontaneous spoken texts by a group of speakers with fluent types of aphasia compared to a group of neurologically healthy speakers. The speakers with aphasia produce significantly fewer nominal compound types in their texts than the non-aphasic speakers, and the compounds they produce exhibit fewer different types of semantic relations than the compounds produced by the non-aphasic speakers. The results are discussed in relation to theories of language processing.

• compounding
• aphasia
• semantics
• spoken language production

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the participation of the informants in this study. We thank all the speech and language therapists, student assistants and colleagues who have helped us with data collection. Hans-Olav Enger and Kristian Emil Kristoffersen have provided useful comments on an earlier draft. A preliminary version of this study was presented at ICPLA 13 at Oslo, 22–26 June 2010, and we thank the participants in the conference as well as two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions for improvement.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this paper.

Notes

1. In Norwegian compounds are generally written as one word (kakeboks ‘cookie jar’), although there is an increasing tendency for the constituents of compounds to be orthographically presented as single words (kake boks). This is not considered the correct form of spelling. Interfixes (-e- and -s-) also occur quite often (as in fugl-e-skremsel ‘scarecrow’). In this article, we present the Norwegian examples with a hyphen between the constituents for the benefit of readers unacquainted with Norwegian.

2. http://www.hf.uio.no/iln/om/organisasjon/tekstlab/prosjekter/nowac/index.html

3. In Norwegian, there are two official written standards – Bokmål and Nynorsk – which are mutually intelligible. Each of the varieties shows considerable internal variation. Historically Bokmål derives from the Dano-Norwegian oral variety used by educated Norwegians, mainly living in the towns, in the nineteenth century, whereas Nynorsk was created by Ivar Aasen in the middle of the nineteenth century primarily on the basis of West Norwegian dialects (Askedal, 2005). Bokmål is used as the written language by the majority of Norwegians, but both varieties are taught in schools, and official documents and so on exist in both varieties

4. In the excerpts from the data, the original Norwegian utterance is in italic, with a gloss line underneath and a translation to English within single quotation marks.

5. There is a phonological paraphasia in tallerksjer (plates), which would normally be tallerkner (a substitution of /∫/ for /n/).

6. There is an agreement error in the phrase den øvre skapet (the upper cupboard): den (definite article) is masculine or feminine, and skapet (cupboard) is neuter.