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Introduction and Aims Idioms differ in their semantic dimensions of familiarity (frequency of encounter), ambiguity(possibility of a literal interpretation), decomposability (possibility of the idiom’s words to assist in its figurative interpretation) and transparency (possibility to deduce the original metaphorical motivation of an idiomatic phrase). Studying clinical populations such as subjects suffering from aphasia, often caused by Left Hemisphere (LH) brain lesions, can help elucidate idiom processing in the brain (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 5). Patients with aphasia sometimes show less impaired comprehension for specific semantic dimensions, suggesting that some idiom semantic dimensions may not depend solely on the LH. However, recent literature (e.g., 1, 3,4) examines whether the types of idioms and tasks employed affect how different brain areas are involved.This study investigates idiom comprehension in aphasia and explores the potential effect of1. the idiom semantic dimensions, and 2. the tasks employed, on the patients’ idiom comprehension. Methods A systematic review was done following the PRISMA approach. Starting from an initial find of n =451, screening and assessment for inclusion and exclusion criteria, 15 articles were retained for further analysis. Extracted information included patient characteristics, types of idiomatic stimuli, types of tasks employed and patients’ performance in idiom comprehension. For the idiomatic stimuli, we extracted information about the combinations of their semantic dimensions, and how these dimensions were defined. For the task employed, we extracted information about the type of the task, the modality of presentation and response, context manipulation as a variable of interest, and whether accuracy and/or reaction times were measured. For the patients’ performance, we extracted information about the errors arising 1. considering different combinations of idiom semantic dimensions, and/or 2. considering thetask design. Results Results indicated that studies in idiom comprehension in aphasia are characterized by heterogeneity regarding the patient characteristics, the idiomatic stimuli and the experimental task employed. Patient ages ranged between 35-82 years old. Out of a total of15 studies, 4 were case studies including Wernicke’s, Broca’s, Global, Anomic orTranscortical Sensory aphasia. The rest considered all types of aphasia as one group. For the idiomatic stimuli, 10 studies used only familiar idioms, 4 studies did not control ambiguity and 6 studies did not measure transparency. Only 1 study mentioned measurements for both transparency and decomposability. Last, only 2 studies included combinations of idiom semantic dimensions. In addition, 4 studies used the term“transparency” but they measured decomposability.For the experimental task, 4 studies conducted only a string-to-word matching task(where participants were presented with an idiomatic string and were provided with different target words), 4 studies conducted only a string-to-picture matching task (where participants were presented with an idiomatic string and were provided with different pictures) and 1 study used only an oral definition task. 4 studies used a combination of the tasks mentioned. 1 study used a reading task, where they asked participants to simply read the idiomatic string they saw and 1 study employed a lexical decision task, where participants were asked to judge whether a target word is related to the idiomatic string hat they have been previously presented with. For the matching tasks, 7 studies included options (either pictures or words) representing (1) the figurative meaning of the idiom, (2) a literally related meaning of the idiom and (3) an unrelated situation, while 4 studies used other options with either excluding the literal meaning or replacing it with a semantic associate. 2 studies included context manipulation. In terms of modality, most studies provided participants with both an oral and a written presentation of the stimuli.Considering participant response, 6 studies required their response by pointing, 1 study by using the keypad, 1 study orally and 6 studies did not specify this. Last, 13 studies focus on accuracy, only 1 measured both reaction times and accuracy as well as reading times and 1reported only on reaction times. Discussion Considering the idiomatic stimuli employed, patients with aphasia show more deteriorated comprehension when presented with unambiguous/opaque and ambiguous/decomposable idioms. In the former case, transparency, i.e., the illustrative motivation of an idiom, may be facilitating comprehension, while in the latter case, decomposability, i.e., the existing link between the idiom’s content words and its figurative meaning, may be hindering comprehension. In addition, idiom types were linked to the involvement of specific brain areas. Current literature can’t unanimously account for what types of idioms involve the left and/or right temporal gyrus, but there are indications that the left Middle Temporal Gyrus(MTG) is predominantly involved in idiom comprehension irrespective of the idioms’ semantic dimensions, while the role of the right MTG is still controversial. Also, patients with frontal lesions show impaired comprehension in ambiguous idioms, but it is uncertain how an intact right temporal lobe would affect (perhaps facilitate) comprehension patterns.Considering the experimental task employed, the string-to-word matching task appears more appropriate for testing patients with aphasia since it does not obfuscate their abilities.However, difficulties arise specifically relating to ambiguous idioms, irrespective of the language. The choice words or pictures for the string-to-word and string-to-picture matching tasks respectively is also crucial. Specifically, more literal errors are observed inmost of the studies, irrespective of the type of task employed. More literal errors compared to unrelated errors are observed for ambiguous and decomposable idioms. Next, context displayed facilitatory outcomes. Patients were more accurate when the context was preceding the idiomatic stimulus rather than when it was following it. Last, modality may be a factor co-influencing the outcomes. Considering the case studies, only the one including the anomic aphasics referred to the error patterns, showing more literal errors with ambiguous/transparent idiomsFinally, this review underlines some limitations. First, the idiom semantic dimensions were insufficiently described and often accompanied by terminological inconsistencies. Second, patient profiles were incomplete, and results were not stratified according to type of aphasia. Future studies should give more information on patient profiles and consider giving information per type of aphasia.

This study aims at investigating the ability of Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to comprehend and produce verbs that vary with respect to their lexical and grammatical aspect. Lexical aspect concerns situation types with different temporal and semantic features, such as activity (run), state (know), achievement (break), semelfactive (hit), accomplishment (build) verbs (Smith 1997). Grammatical aspect is divided into perfective (I untied) and imperfective (I was untying) (Comrie 1976). The interaction of lexical and grammatical aspect and how that might be affected by patients’ linguistic impairment is also examined., Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics, Vol 23 (2019): Selected Papers on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from 23rd ISTAL, Thessaloniki 31 March - 2 April 2017

The paper reports findings obtained from a naming by definition task in two Greek-speaking individuals with the agrammatic variant of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA-G). One of the patients was at an early stage of the disease while the other was at a more advanced stage. The patient who was at a later stage produced a greater number of errors that differed significantly from healthy controls. This suggests that PPA-G affects compound naming albeit at a later stage. Qualitative error analysis highlights morphological impairment behind these difficulties in contrast to stroke induced aphasia., Selected papers on theoretical and applied linguistics, Vol 22 (2017): Selected Papers on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from ISTAL, Thessaloniki 24-26 April 2015

Supplemental material, Supplementary_Material for Subject–verb agreement and verbal short-term memory: A perspective from Greek children with specific language impairment by Marina Lalioti, Stavroula Stavrakaki, Christina Manouilidou and Ioanna Talli in First Language

It has repeatedly been shown that agrammatic speakers have problems with verbs: In narrative speech, they provide less information by verbs than healthy speakers and the verbs that they produce are often not inflected for tense and agreement. Several explanations have been given for this phenomenon, for example, that argument structure complexity plays an important role (Thompson, J Neurolinguistics 16:151–167, 2003) and that time reference, especially reference to the past, is hard for agrammatic speakers (Bastiaanse, J Neurolinguistics 21:104–119, 2008; Bastiaanse, Clin Linguist Phon 27:244–263, 2013). The current study tested the combined influence of argument structure and time reference through tense and aspect using the aspect assignment model and shows that agrammatic speakers use is influenced by a combination of factors, including telicity, transitivity, tense, and aspect rather than by arguments structure or past time reference alone.

The primary motivation for the research reported in the present dissertation was to investigate the status of thematic features (TFs) in deverbal nominals (DNs) in Modern Greek. The investigation addressed two independent issues with respect to TFs of DNs. The first was whether the processing of TFs of DNs constitutes a necessary step in accessing their mental representation. The second concerned the status of thematic constraints in deverbal word formation. Three on-line lexical decision tasks and one off-line grammaticality judgment task were carried out. The stimuli for these tasks included deverbal nouns, deverbal adjectives and pseudo-words violating thematic constraints. The findings showed that TFs appear to increase processing load only for those DNs with an increased eventive character (e.g. plysimo 'washing', kallymenos 'covered'), with a decomposition access route possibly playing a facilitatory role. In contrast, TFs do not appear to affect processing in the case of DNs with a diminished 'verb-like' character (e.g. conqueror). Furthermore, lexical access results for pseudo-words indicated that TFs impose constraints which operate at a later stage of word formation compared to other constraints, such as categorial specifications of the base. This strongly suggests that TFs play a crucial role in the creation of new DNs, independently of the type of nominal. The findings of the present study have implications for both psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics. The psycholinguistic implications relate to the stage-like nature of lexical access, the existence of a general representational component called feature representation, and the role of grammatical class in both lexical access and the organization of the lexicon. The linguistic implications principally inform theories of word formation postulating feature percolation, as well as the role of various constraints operating during derivation. The experimental results support the view that the creation of a new word is subject to constraints specific to the morphological operations involved in it, such as thematic constraints for DNs. Furthermore, constraints seem to apply sequentially, with degrees of violability even for those constraints which are considered to be strong. More importantly, there appears to be a relationship between violability and late application, with those constraints that apply at a later stage being more violable.

Verbs play an important role in how events, states and other “happenings” are mentally represented and how they are expressed in natural language. Besides their central role in linguistics, verbs have long been prominent topics of research in analytic philosophy—mostly on the nature of events and predicate-argument structure—and a topic of empirical investigation in psycholinguistics, mostly on argument structure and its role in sentence comprehension. More recently, the representation of verb meaning has been gaining momentum as a topic of research in other cognitive science branches, notably neuroscience and the psychology of concepts. The present volume is an expression of this recent surge in the investigation of verb structure and meaning from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science, with up-to-date contributions by theoretical linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists and neuroscientists. The volume presents new theoretical and empirical studies on how verb structure and verb meaning are represented, how they are processed during language comprehension, how they are acquired, and how they are neurologically implemented. Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing is a reflection of the recent collaboration between the disciplines that constitute cognitive science, bringing new empirical data and theoretical insights on a key element of natural language and conceptualization.