Beyond picture naming: norms and patient data for a verb-generation task

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Neurolinguistics
• Speech-Language Pathology

Background:

• Verb generation is a complex cognitive task.
• Assessing verb generation is crucial for understanding language deficits in aphasia.
• Existing measures may not fully capture the nuances of verb production.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish normative data for verb generation from pictures.
• To evaluate the effectiveness of verb generation as an outcome measure in aphasia treatment.

Main Methods:

• Phase I: 50 healthy volunteers generated verbs for 218 pictures.
• Phase II: 4 persons with aphasia (PWAs) generated verbs for trained, untrained, and baseline-named objects.
• Verb generation was assessed before and after a 6-month home practice program.

Main Results:

• No object yielded perfect verb agreement in the normative sample.
• Objects with high agreement were typically artifacts or had dominant functional associations.
• PWAs showed improvement in verb generation post-practice, irrespective of training focus.

Conclusions:

• A validated set of verb generation norms is now available.
• Verb generation is more cognitively demanding than object naming.
• This task can bridge the gap between naming and propositional speech in aphasia.