Language Imaging Lab Aphasia Battery

(~15 minutes)

Semantic Verb Matching

This test assesses conceptual knowledge about verbs, using a procedure identical to the Semantic Noun Matching test. There is extensive evidence for behavioral and neurophysiological differences between noun and verb processing (Boulenger et al., 2008; Kemmerer, 2014). Several studies indicate differences in the processing of abstract and concrete verb concepts (Desai et al., 2010; Fernandino et al., 2013).

Materials:

120 concrete verbs referring to physical hand and/or arm actions
120 abstract verbs referring to emotional, cognitive, and other non-physical events
organized into 40 concrete and 40 abstract triads each containing a sample and 2 choices (see figure)
Concrete and abstract conditions matched on length, number of orthographic and phonological neighbors, frequency, mean naming RT, mean RT and accuracy in lexical decision (Balota et al., 2007), and proportions of transitive and intransitive argument structures.

Procedure:

patient manually selects the alternative that is most similar in meaning to the sample item

Data analysis:

%correct overall and each condition; chi-square tests for category effects; mean RT by condition

References

Balota DA, Yap MJ, Cortese MJ, Hutchison KA, Kessler B, Loftis B, et al. (2007). The English Lexicon Project. Behavioral Research Methods, 39, 445-459.

Boulenger V, Mechtouff L, Thobois S, Broussolle E, Jeannerod M, & Nazir TA. (2008). Word processing in Parkinson's disease is impaired for action verbs but not for concrete nouns. Neuropsychologia, 46, 743-756.

Desai R, Binder JR, Conant L, & Seidenberg MS. (2010). Activation of sensory-motor areas in sentence comprehension. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 468–478 .

Fernandino L, Conant LL, Binder JR, Blindauer K, Hiner B, Spangler K, & Desai RH. (2013). Parkinson’s disease disrupts both automatic and controlled processing of action verbs. Brain and Language, 127, 65–74.

Kemmerer D. (2014). Word classes in the brain: Implications of linguistic typology for cognitive neuroscience. Cortex, 58, 27-51.