Verb production in fluent aphasia : a study of lexical organization

This study examined the nature of verb deficits in 5 individuals with fluent aphasia. Factors related to verb production in fluent aphasia were examined by comparing performance on naming, comprehension, sentence completion, and narrative tasks. Results demonstrated that fluent aphasic individuals showed impaired verb production that was influenced by the syntactic structure of the verbs as well as by semantic features. Fluent participants showed a pattern of progressively greater difficulty with verbs associated with more arguments. The semantic complexity of verbs affected the participants in the sentence completion tasks and narrative tasks.