Sentence Production

Question 1

What occurs at the a) Functional and b) Positional levels of Garret’s Model of sentence production?

Answer 1

a) Functional level
- semantic retrieval
- determination of argument structure
- assignment of lexical items to predicate-argument structure
b) Positional Level
- phonological retrieval
- syntactic planning
- insertion

Question 2

In both agrammatism and paragrammatism, where do the impairments lie?

Answer 2

• disturbances affecting the realisation of thematic roles
• disturbances of generating syntactic form
• disturbances of production of ‘grammatical’ vocabulary elements

Question 3

List some characteristics of agrammatism

Answer 3

• reduced length of utterances
• structurally impoverished verb-argument structure
• simplified syntactic structures
• omissions/substitutions of free and bound morphemes
• omissions of function words
• paucity of verbs, so content words predominate, especially nouns (‘serial naming’)

Question 4

List some characteristics of paragrammatism

Answer 4

• juxtaposition of unacceptable sequences
• confusion of verb tense
• errors in pronoun case and gender
• incorrect choice of prepositions
• substitutions of morphological elements with free standing function words
• omission of function words and bound morphemes

Question 5

List some tests for the assessment of sentence production and state what they assess

Answer 5

TRIP - thematic roles in production
- compares retrieval of the same item across single-word and in sentence contexts, which take 1,2 and 3 arguments

VAST - Verb and Sentence Test
- examines the ability to retrieve words from the lexicon, use them in sentences and to form various types of sentences

NAVS - Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences
- comprehensive assessment of verb and sentence production, with to argument structure and canonicity

NAT - Northwestern Anagram Test
- designed to assess non-verbal production of canonical and non-canonical sentences

BAPPA-F - Battery for the assessment of plural processing in aphasia
- assesses capacity to produce number markings in spoken word productions
BOTH FREQUENCY AND REGULARITY are assessed in the four tests:
1. picture naming (spoken or written)
2. reading aloud
3. repetition
4. written word-picture verification

Question 6

List the four types of sentence production therapy

Answer 6

• verb therapies
• mapping/argument structure therapy
• treatment of the underlying form
• remediating production of verb tense morphology

Question 7

What 4 levels should a verb therapy target? List how they would be treated.

Answer 7

1. lexical level (action naming - response to naming)
2. Syntactic level (retrieval of infinitive in sentence - picture + written sentence with verb omitted; client fills in verb)
3. Morphosyntactic level (retrieval of finite verb in sentence - inflected verb: tense, agreement)
4. Sentence construction (constructing a grammatical sentence in response to a picture)

Question 8

What is the principle of treatment of the underlying forms therapy?

Answer 8

• training underlying, abstract properties of language will generalise to untrained structures that share similar linguistic properties
• generalisation is enhanced when the direction of treatment from more to less complex sentences

Question 9

Discuss the process of TUF, which clients are suitable to this kind of therapy and the nan-canonical constructions targeted in this therapy.

Answer 9

Treatment targets the tops of the hierarchical syntactic tree
- treatment improves both production and comprehension

Suitable for:
- mild-moderate agrammatic aphasia
- agrammatic output with better lexical comprehension than sentence comprehension
- negative effects of noncanonicity and reversibility
- more severe clients may not benefit as much

Treatment of:
- object cleft
- object relative
- object wh-