Lexically specific verb information: understanding sentence processing in the aphasic population

Transitivity is the frequency with which verbs are used with a direct object (transitively) or without one (intransitively), and it has been shown that unimpaired adults use transitivity information as they read (Clifton, Connie & Frazier 1984; Trueswell, Tanenhaus & Kello, 1993; Garnsey, 1997; Staub, 2007) or listen to sentences (Arai & Keller, 2012) to predict upcoming words. The current study tested persons with aphasia and age-matched, unimpaired adults as they read sentences containing verbs which varied in their transitivity. Gahl (2000) reported that both people with aphasia and unimpaired controls show sensitivity to verb frequency information under the Lexical Bias Hypothesis. Results from the unimpaired group indicated no use of transitivity in their initial parsing of sentences. Results from people with aphasia showed a significant use of transitivity during sentence processing. The data suggests that in the wake of language impairment, an individual may rely on transitivity to glean information from a sentence