title: A characterization of verb use in Turkish agrammatic narrative speech.
abstract: This study investigates the characteristics of narrative-speech production and the use of verbs in Turkish agrammatic speakers (n = 10) compared to non-brain-damaged controls (n = 10). To elicit narrative-speech samples, personal interviews and storytelling tasks were conducted. Turkish has a large and regular verb inflection paradigm where verbs are inflected for evidentiality (i.e. direct versus indirect evidence available to the speaker). Particularly, we explored the general characteristics of the speech samples (e.g. utterance length) and the uses of lexical, finite and non-finite verbs and direct and indirect evidentials. The results show that speech rate is slow, verbs per utterance are lower than normal and the verb diversity is reduced in the agrammatic speakers. Verb inflection is relatively intact; however, a trade-off pattern between inflection for direct evidentials and verb diversity is found. The implications of the data are discussed in connection with narrative-speech production studies on other languages.
authors.affiliation: a International Doctorate in Experimental Approaches to Language and Brain (IDEALAB), Universities of Groningen (NL), Newcastle (UK), Potsdam (DE), Trento (IT) and Macquarie University Sydney (AUS).
authors.forename: Seçkin
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Arslan
authors.affiliation: b Institute of German Language and Literature I, University of Cologne , Cologne , Germany.
authors.forename: Elif
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Bamyacı
authors.affiliation: c Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG) , University of Groningen , Groningen , The Netherlands.
authors.forename: Roelien
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bastiaanse
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000503:physiopathology; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D033262:Narration; D014421:Turkey; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Agrammatism; Turkish; discourse-linking; evidentiality; finiteness; narrative speech; verbs