Publications

Publication details [#1198]

Duvignau, Karine, Thi Mai Tran and Mélanie Manchon. 2013. For a New Look at ‘Lexical Errors’: Evidence from Semantic Approximations with Verbs in Aphasia. Journal of psycholinguistic research 42 (4) : 339–347. 9 pp.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
Cham: Springer

Abstract

The ability to understand the similarity between two phenomena is fundamental for humans. Designated by the term analogy in psychology, this ability plays a role in the categorization of phenomena in the world and in the organisation of the linguistic system. The use of analogy in language often results in non-standard utterances, particularly in speakers with aphasia. These non-standard utterances are almost always studied in a nominal context and considered as errors. We propose a study of the verbal lexicon and present findings that measure, by an action-video naming task, the importance of verb-based non-standard utterances made by 17 speakers with aphasia (“la dame déshabille l’orange”/the lady undresses the orange, “elle casse la tomate”/she breaks the tomato). The first results we have obtained allow us to consider these type of utterances from a new perspective: we propose to eliminate the label of “error”, suggesting that they may be viewed as semantic approximations based upon a relationship of inter-domain synonymy and are ingrained in the heart of the lexical system.