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Selective Impairment in Closed-Class Word Production: A Single Case Study

Elizabeth E. Galletta1, 2* and Paola Marangolo3, 4
  • 1 New York University/Langone Medical Center, Rusk Rehabilitation - Speech Language Pathology, United States
  • 2 Graduate Center, City University of New York, Speech Language Hearing Sciences, United States
  • 3 University of Federico II, Department of Humanities Studies, Italy
  • 4 IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Italy

Background: Linguistic theory considers function words to be different from lexical categories (Chomsky, 1995), though dependent upon them. Different from open-class words (i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives and some adverbs) that carry most of the semantic content of a sentence, closed-class words (prepositions, auxiliaries, articles) specify the relationship among content words and their syntactic roles within sentences (Miceli, 1996). Researchers report that in agrammatic aphasia there is limited use of closed class grammatical morphemes (e.g. Thompson et al., 2013). Due to the syntactic role that closed-class words play, the closed-class-word deficit has been considered to be a syntactic problem that has relevance at the sentence level (e.g. Grodzinsky, 1988, 1990; Bastiaanse, 2003). Case Study: P.L., a right-handed 42-year-old Italian woman suffered a left-hemisphere CVA, which resulted in mild Broca’s aphasia. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed the presence of a lesion including the inferior portion of the frontal lobe, the temporal areas, the insula, the posterior segment of the lenticular nucleus and the inferior parietal lobule. Although largely recovered from comprehension and word finding difficulties, at the time of the experimental investigation, spontaneous speech was still agrammatic. Summary of Testing: P.L.’s performance in single word processing of open-class words was in line with the results of the standardized language battery (B.A.D.A., Miceli et al., 1994) confirming the presence of recovered ability in single word retrieval of content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and some retained difficulties in reading and writing of those words due to morphological errors (see Figure). However, for function word processing, there was a clear dissociation between performance in comprehension tasks, which was almost preserved, and selective inability in producing free-standing grammatical morphemes (prepositions and auxiliaries) in sentence completion tasks and in producing articles corresponding to invariable nouns. She was also unable to produce prepositional compounds and prepositional phrases in a picture description task (see Figure). Discussion: Despite spared word finding abilities, P.L.’s experimental investigation showed that her agrammatic speech mostly reflected a selective deficit in producing closed–class words (cf. Thompson et al., 2013). Morphological inflected errors were also present in noun and verb production. According to Garrett’s model (Garrett, 1980, 1982), open- and closed-class words are processed at two different levels of sentence production. The lexical selection of open-class words occurs at the functional level, where they are represented by abstract, lexical representations (the lemmas in Levelt’s lexical model, 1992). At the next level, the positional level, the structural organization of the sentence allows the insertion of the phonological representation of open-class words in a syntactic frame (the lexemes in the lexical model; see Levelt, 1992) and specifies free-standing (closed-class words) and bound grammatical morphemes (nominal, adjectival and verbal inflections). This case supports that the representation of closed-class words is intimately linked to the syntactic organization of the sentence supporting the hypothesis that the deficit is related to damage at the positional level (Garrett, 1980, 1982).

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References

Bastiaanse, R. (2003). Verb retrieval problems at the word and sentence level: Localization of the functional impairments and clinical implications. In R. De Blesser and I. Papathanasiou (Eds.). The sciences of aphasia: From therapy to theory. London, Elsevier.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Garrett, M.F. (1980). Levels of processing in sentence production. In: Butterworth B., Language production, Vol.1, New York: Academic Press.
Garrett, M.F. (1982). Production of speech: Observations from normal and pathological language. In: A. W. Ellis (Ed.), Normality and pathology in cognitive functions, New York: Academic Press. Grodzinsky, Y. (1988). Syntactic representation in agrammatism: The case of prepositions. Language and Speech, 31, 115–134.
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Levelt, W.J.M., (1992). Accessing words in speech production: Stages, processes and representations. Cognition, 42: 1-22.
Miceli, G. (1996). Deficit grammaticali nell’afasia. In Denes G., & Pizzamiglio L. (2nd Ed.), Manuale di Neuropsicologia. Normalità e patologia dei processi cognitivi (pp. 326-359). Bologna: Zanichelli.
Thompson, C.K., Meltzer-Asscher, A., Cho, S., Lee, J., Wieneke, C., Weintraub, S., Mesulam, M. (2013). Syntactic and morphosynactic processing in stroke-induced and primary progressive aphasia. Behavioral Neurology; 26(1-2): 35-54. doi: 10.3233/BEN-2012-110220

Keywords: agrammatic aphasia, speech production, open-class words, closed-class words, Aphasia

Conference: 54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting, Llandudno, United Kingdom, 16 Oct - 18 Oct, 2016.

Presentation Type: Poster Sessions

Topic: Academy of Aphasia

Citation: Galletta EE and Marangolo P (2016). Selective Impairment in Closed-Class Word Production: A Single Case Study. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: 54th Annual Academy of Aphasia Meeting. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2016.68.00078

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Received: 29 Apr 2016; Published Online: 15 Aug 2016.

* Correspondence: Prof. Elizabeth E Galletta, New York University/Langone Medical Center, Rusk Rehabilitation - Speech Language Pathology, New York, New York, 10016, United States, elizabeth.galletta@gmail.com