Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics
Doi
Abstract
This paper investigates noun and verb comprehension and production in two groups of late bilingual Greek (L1)/English (L2) speakers: individuals with anomic aphasia, and a control group of non-brain injured individuals matched for age and gender. There were no significant differences in verb or noun comprehension between the two groups in either language. However, verb and noun production in a picture naming task was significantly worse in the bilingual individuals with anomic aphasia in both languages than in the control group. Anomic aphasic individuals also showed genuine verb impairments in both Greek and English. Moreover, even though residual second language proficiency was overall poorer than first language proficiency, this did not have a significant impact on the findings. Overall, the findings support the uni-directional hypothesis that verbs are more difficult to retrieve than nouns because their linguistic structure is inherently more complex than that of nouns. The potential underlying level of breakdown of the specific verb impairment is discussed in relation to the serial model of word processing
