Production of nouns and verbs in aphasia: Effects of elicitation context

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Abstract
This study investigated the ability of 10 aphasic speakers and 9 normal controls to produce unambiguous, frequency-matched nouns and verbs in four elicitation conditions. Two auditory conditions included naming to definition and sentence completion; two picture conditions preceded the presentation of the picture with an auditory cue consisting of a question (what is the action shown here?) or a sentence completion (this is a picture of the action to...). Patients were grouped in terms of whether they demonstrated only word retrieval problems (anomia), or also showed difficulty with sentence comprehension and production. Contrary to expectations, there were no reliable effects of elicitation condition on performance. Although both groups of aphasic speakers found verbs more difficult than nouns to retrieve across conditions, the sentence production-impaired group showed a more severe impairment of verb production that was reliable for individual subjects. Results reinforce the importance of grammatical class as a factor in the word retrieval impairments found in aphasia.