VERBAL DEFICITS IN APHASIA: EVIDENCE FROM NATIVE SPEAKERS OF SERBIAN

Abstract

Deficits in word retrieval are commonly attested in aphasia. These have a major impact in verbs, especially after lesions causing the emergence of Broca’s aphasia. Verbs are not only complex entities, but the core of the sentence, and constitute a central issue for both the proper understanding of language deficits, and assessment and recovery purposes. In this paper, we review the existing literature describing the speech of Serbian-speaking individuals with aphasia to explore the degree of preservation of verbal forms in this population. The role of different factors – such as the nature of the verb, its argument structure and the morphological markers attached to it – are discussed and contrasted in these lines against the multiple hypotheses proposed so far in the search for a unified explanation.