Comparing compound verb production in Persian-speaking non-brain-damaged adults, and people with fluent and non-fluent aphasia

Persian verbs are classified into simple and compound (complex) verbs (CVs). Simple verbs contain one word; CVs comprise more than one word, including nominal and verbal components. This study investigates how people with aphasia (PWA) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) adults produce complex verbs, the types of errors they make and what the effect is of lemma representation and the compound status of the verbs. Forty-five participants, including 11 fluent PWA, 9 non-fluent PWA, and 25 NBDs, completed action naming and connected speech tasks. The findings revealed that CV retrieval was impaired in PWA; although they showed knowledge ('lemma') of the compound structure, they failed to retrieve the phonological form ('lexeme'). We therefore assume a two lemma representation for CVs except for idiomatic CVs, and CVs with a heavier verbal component which are represented as one lemma.