Rehabilitation of past tense verb production and non-canonical sentence production in left inferior frontal non-fluent aphasia

摘要

Background: Studies devoted to improving past tense verb production in Broca's aphasic patients are sparse. Of the existing studies few have produced generalised improvement on untreated verbs, although one study has shown improvement on untreated regular, but not irregular, verbs (Weinrich, Boser, & McCall, 199933. Weinrich , M. , Boser , K. I. and McCall , D. 1999 . Representation of linguistic rules in the brain: Evidence from training an aphasic participant to produce past tense verb morphology . Brain and Language , 70 : 144 - 158 . [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]View all references). Within a single mechanism account of past tense verb production (McClelland & Patterson, 2002a19. McClelland , J. L. and Patterson , K. 2002a . ‘Words Or Rules’ cannot exploit the regularity in exceptions: Reply to Pinker and Ullman . Trends in Cognitive Science , 6 : 464 - 465 . [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]View all references, 200220. McClelland , J. L. and Patterson , K. 2002b . Rules or connections in past-tense inflections: What does the evidence rule out? . Trends in Cognitive Sciences , 6 : 465 - 472 . [CrossRef], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®], [CSA]View all referencesb), irregular verbs fall into clusters that share similar transformations from their stem to past tense. No studies to our knowledge have explored whether strengthening irregular verb representations during rehabilitation can support production on untreated irregulars from the same irregular clusters.