Age-Related Verb Naming Abilities Depending on the Argument Structures

Sung, Jee Eun; Kwag, Eun Jung

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2012;17(4): 550-564.
Published online December 31, 2012.

Age-Related Verb Naming Abilities Depending on the Argument Structures

Jee Eun Sung, and Eun Jung Kwag

Department of Communication Disorders, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea

Corresponding Author: Eun Jung Kwag ,Tel: +82 2 3277 2208, Email: jeesung@ewha.ac.kr

Received October 16, 2012 Accepted October 30, 2012

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ABSTRACT

Background & Objectives
The purpose of the current study was to investigate age-related verb naming abilities depending on the argument structures of verbs.
Methods
A total of 60 normal participants participated in the study. Participants were divided into 3 groups: Group 1 (20 to 39 years of age), Group 2 (60 to 64 years of age) and Group 3 (above 65 years of age). Verbs were classified into 4 categories based on the argument structure: one-place unergative, one-place unaccusative, two-place, and three-place verbs. Stimuli for a verb naming task were presented using animation.
Results
The ANCOVA results after controlling for years of education and the Korean-Mini Mental Status Exam (K-MMSE) scores revealed that the main effects for age and argument structure were statistically significant. Group 3 performed significantly worse on a verbnaming task than Group 1 and 2. Participants showed greater difficulties in the three-place and two-place verbs compared to the one-place unaccusative verbs. The partial correlation coefficients between age and verb naming performance were statistically significant after controlling for years of education and K-MMSE.
Discussion & Conclusion
The results were consistent with previous findings, which suggested that age is related to verb naming difficulties. Performance on verb naming depending on the argument structure was partially consistent with previous findings. However, there were some discrepancies across languages and Korean-specific verb syntactic structures need to be further investigated. (Korean Journal of Communication Disorders 2012; 17:550-564)

Keywords: age | verb naming | argument structure