Abstract
This study reports on the pattern of performance on spoken and written naming, spelling to dictation, and oral reading of single verbs and nouns in a bilingual speaker with aphasia in two first languages that differ in morphological complexity, orthographic transparency, and script: Greek (L1a) and English (L1b). The results reveal no verb/noun grammatical class differences in spoken naming or reading aloud in either language. For the written modality, only one task (spelling dictated words) in only one language (Greek) showed a grammatical class difference with verbs significantly easier to spell than nouns. Written picture naming revealed no verb/noun grammatical class difference in either language, suggesting an impairment specific to spelling processes for nouns in Greek. In general, the findings reveal no overall difference in processing verbs and nouns across languages, tasks, and modalities.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Throughout this paper the term ‘bilingual’ should be understood as synonymous in all relevant aspects with ‘multilingual’.
2. Both are non-language tasks and so (brief) instructions for completion were given in only one language.
3. Picture complexity was measured based on instructions given in Greek.
4. However, access to word semantics is not considered critical for accurate spelling to dictation or oral reading.
5. Deep dysgraphia is an extreme form of phonological dysgraphia characterized by effects of lexicality (i.e., better spelling of words than non-words), effects of imageability (i.e., better spelling of highly imageable words such as ‘bed’ than less imageable words such as ‘dream’), and effects of grammatical class (i.e., better spelling of nouns than of verbs in writing to dictation).