Journal of Neurolinguistics: Maria Kambanaros

Journal of Neurolinguistics 26 (2013) 160177
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Journal of Neurolinguistics
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jneuroling
Does verb type affect action naming in specic language

impairment (SLI)? Evidence from instrumentality and name
relation
Maria Kambanaros*
University of Cyprus, Cyprus Acquisition Team, 75 Kallipoleos, P.O. Box 20537, 1678 Nicosia, Cyprus
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Children with specic language impairment (SLI) have particular
Received 21 June 2012
problems using verbs. However, not much is known about how
Received in revised form 13 July 2012
Accepted 17 July 2012 children with SLI retrieve different types of verbs. In the present
study, bilectal Greek-speaking children with and without SLI were
Keywords:
assessed on naming of different verbs held constant for argument
Instrumental verbs structure but manipulated for lexical-semantic and phonological-
Non-instrumental verbs lexical features.
Greek School-aged children with SLI as well as typically developing age-
Diglossia and vocabulary-matched peers named 39 colored photographs
Lemma representing actions in a confrontation naming task. Stimuli
Lexeme included actions involving an instrument (e.g., sweeping), i.e.
Semantic complexity
instrumental verbs, and actions that have a name-relation with the
instrument (e.g., sawing), i.e. name-related instrumental verbs as
well as actions not involving an instrument (e.g., climbing), i.e.
non-instrumental verbs.
Instrumental verbs were signicantly more difcult to retrieve
than non-instrumental verbs for children with SLI and typically
language-developing controls. In contrast, instrumental verbs with
a name relation to the noun were signicantly easier to name than
instrumental verbs without a name relation for all groups.
Children with SLI performed on par with vocabulary-matched
peers. The results based on error types suggest that the greater
difculties children with SLI have with action naming is lexical-
semantic in nature.
* Corresponding author. Tel.: 357 22 89 51 94; fax: 357 22 75 03 10.

E-mail address: kambanaros@gmail.com.
0911-6044/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jneuroling.2012.07.003
M. Kambanaros / Journal of Neurolinguistics 26 (2013) 160177 161
The ndings indicate a need to examine the link between the verb
naming decit in SLI to structural and functional abnormalities in
Brocas area.
2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Children presenting with specic language impairment (SLI) have variable decits in different
components of the grammar (syntax, morphology, phonology) as well as other aspects of language
(e.g., vocabulary) in the absence of factors that typically accompany language problems such as hearing
impairment, low non-verbal IQ, neurological damage, or socio-emotional deprivation. SLI is considered
a neurodevelopmental disorder in which complex genetic and multiple environmental risk factors are
implicated (see Bishop, 2006).
One recent cross-linguistic characteristic to emerge is a decit in grammatical word class pro-
cessing, with verbs typically more impaired compared to nouns (Kambanaros, Grohmann, &
Theodorou, 2010; Kambanaros, Psahoulia, & Mataragka, 2010; Sheng & McGregor, 2010b). Indeed,
the verb lexicon of SLI children has generated much research over the last thirty years concerning
inectional morphology (see Rice, 2009), argument-structure complexity (see Pizzioli & Schelstraete,
2008), and lexical-semantic access (see Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2010, 2011). The latter is a new
domain and the least researched (of the three) but the topic of the present study. It relates to difculties
with verb processing children with SLI have outside the classic area of morphosyntax, but instead
within the semantic and/or phonological lexicon, that is, in accessing and retrieving stored verb
meanings from memory.
At the neural level, verb processing is supported by the left frontal cortex, mainly Brocas area
(Shapiro, Moo, & Caramazza, 2006). Most recently, research using functional imaging (voxel-based
morphometry) identied structural and functional abnormalities in the left inferior frontal gyrus or
Brocas area in children and adolescents with SLI (Badcock, Bishop, Hardiman, Barry, & Watkins, 2011).
The focus of the present research is on verbs that require an obligatory instrument to perform an
action (e.g., sweep requires a broom) versus verbs that do not (e.g., climb a mountain/tree/ladder), and
between verbs that have a lexical link such as a name relation between the instrument and the verb
(e.g., the saw to saw), which to date have only been reported in acquired language breakdown (see
Kambanaros, 2009b, and references within).
Every verb meaning has two key components. First, they involve an event schema representing an
event type which can have simple structural meaning of the type [x ACT<MANNER>] or a more
complex one such as [[x ACT<MANNER>] CAUSE [BECOME [y <RES-STATE>]]]. Second, a root is
characterized by the ontological type chosen from a xed set of options (e.g., state, result, location,
manner, etc.) expressing the idiosyncratic properties of the verb meaning. For example, if an object or
noun (N) names an instrument, the corresponding action or verb (V) means use that instrument for its
purpose: instrument / [x ACT <INSTRUMENT>] (e.g., brush, hammer, saw, shovel, sweep). Associa-
tions are probably not linguistic, but rather reect general cognitive principles. Instrument roots are
really a subtype of manner roots, behaving like them in all respects. In addition, instrument roots are
integrated into schemas as modiers of predicates, and as such instrumental verbs are by denition
semantically more complex (see Rappaport Hovav & Levin, 2010, on all points regarding verb
meanings).
In Indo-European languages like Modern Greek, the language under investigation (as well as
English, Dutch, French, etc.), instrumentality can be expressed by means of a prepositional phrase to
verbalize the instrument (e.g., The man is sawing the wood with a saw1) or simply by the instrumental
1
The instrument is rarely used with the instrumental verb in the same sentence, however, as this gives it a semantically but
not necessarily syntactically unusual reading (Jonkers, 1998).
162 M. Kambanaros / Journal of Neurolinguistics 26 (2013) 160177
verb itself (e.g., The man is sawing). Instrumental verbs can be divided into two types: (i) instrumental
verbs with a name relation to the instrument (e.g., to saw and the saw), where one and the same
(phonological) word form represents a noun as well as a verb, and (ii) instrumental verbs with no name
relation to the instrument (e.g., to sew and needle).
In a stem-based language like Greek, name-related NV pairs are not represented by one word form
but instead share the same stem or root. Speakers of Greek need to correctly inect the stem with
either a nominal or a verbal inection to produce the instrument/noun and instrumental verb,
respectively. For example, prion is the stem for either (a) saw or (to) saw. It has little semantic value
at the stage prior to inection. When inected with the afx i it becomes the nominative or accusative
case-marked singular noun lemma prioni ((a) saw) and with the afxes iz o it becomes the rst
person singular present tense indicative verb lemma prionizo ((I) saw).
Based on models of the lexicon such as Levelts (1989, 2001), the conceptual-semantic and the
syntactic information of a lexical entry (i.e. the lemma-level information) is needed for grammatical
encoding. In response to an action picture, a verb lemma is activated, specifying lexical-syntactic
information such as the verbs argument structure, tense, person, and number information. For
example, the verb sew has two semantic arguments, an external argument (the agent role) and an
internal argument (the theme or patient role); syntactically, we say that as a transitive verb, it takes
one object to project a verb phrase and then combines with a subject. In addition, at the level of the
lemma, lexical-semantic knowledge about the verb is activated and may include specic attributes
such as [instrument]. Specically, for the verb sew the objects needle and thread may also be part of
the (pictured) action semantics. Hence, instrumentality is a feature operating at the level of the lemma.
At the second stage of word retrieval, the lexeme or word form corresponding to the selected
lemma is phonologically specied. Lexemes contain information about the phonology of a word
(number of syllables, prosody, segmentation) and its morphology (verb inections). Lexeme-level
information for saw includes the phonemes /s/ and /:/, and the morphophonological variant that
allows it to become a verb (or a noun) in Modern Greek. Hence, name relation is a phonological
property operating at the level of the word form. For successful lexicalization in the discrete two-step
model of Levelt (1989), adequate amounts of information within both the lemma and the lexeme must
be available and activated for the target item to be retrieved. This presupposes an effective ow of
unidirectional information about the lexical entry between these two levels of processing.
Lexical entries are no longer considered to be listed as words organized in a single-word format
within a (mental) dictionary. Instead they are integrated and interconnected based on shared infor-
mation at the conceptual, syntactic, morphological, and/or phonological levels, thus allowing for easier
access and retrieval. Specically, Levelt (1989) describes this relationship between lexical items with
similar lemma and/or lexeme information as intrinsic. To illustrate, the verbs sweep and mop are
intrinsically related because they both are actions of cleaning (manner) involving an item with a pole or
handle (instrument). This of course results in multiple simultaneous activations of lexical cohorts as
competitors. Yet, once all available information about the specic target word is integrated and pro-
cessed, only one remains active, and all other semantic and/or phonological competitors are deacti-
vated so that the target word is eventually produced. Furthermore, verbs with additional and more
specic semantic components (e.g., compare sweep with clean) are considered more complex (Breedin,
Saffran, & Schwartz, 1998).
2. Background to the study
Children with SLI have particular problems learning and using verbs, and this characteristic is
considered, at least for English, a clinical marker of SLI (Rice, 1991, 2003). A small body of literature,
usually based on the analysis of spontaneous language, has shown that children with SLI use
semantically less specic verbs, compared to typically developing peers. They are also reported to rely
more heavily on a subset of non-specic verbs to describe events and actions often termed general-all-
purpose (GAP) verbs, such as do, get, have, make, put, come, give, look, play, see, take, or want (Conti-
Ramsden & Jones, 1997; de Jong, 1999; Kelly, 1997; Rice & Bode, 1993; Watkins, Rice, & Moltz,
1993)dand their counterparts across languages (e.g., Stavrakaki, 2000, for Modern Greek). In all
cases, the lexical-semantic specication of the verb is so general that it can be used in a multitude of
contexts. The use of GAP verbs as stand-ins for more specic verbs has been linked to difculties
children with SLI have with fast mapping of verb meanings or world-to-word mapping of the action
(Rice & Bode, 1993; Stavrakaki, 2000), extracting verb meanings or the greater polysemy of verbs (de
Jong, 1999), and establishing categorical and/or semantic boundaries for verbs (Kelly, 1997).
In the study by de Jong (1999), lexical access for specic verb types was targeted for investigation
using a confrontation naming task. By means of video clips, four sets of verbs differing in manner
features were investigated: going verbs (e.g., skipping), putting verbs (e.g., sewing), cutting verbs
(e.g., cutting), and cleaning verbs (e.g., mopping). They were all shown to participating Dutch school-
aged children (mean age 7; 8 years) with and without SLI who were required to name the action
appearing on the screen. For the purpose of the present study the category of going verbs will not be
discussed further. Of the seventeen verbs belonging to the other three categories, eight were actions
that involved an instrument as part of their action semantics (e.g., sew, stick/glue, pin, cut, lawn mowing,
scrub/mop, and hoover).2 Children with SLI committed mainly substitution errors by either replacing
the semantically-specic action name with a general-all-purpose (GAP) verb construction (e.g., for
mop/scrub / make clean) or omitting the instrument feature but retaining the manner of the action
(e.g., for pin / hang). de Jong (1999, p. 178) claimed that children with SLI adopt a lexical under-
specication strategy and as such have difculty matching an action with the proper verb.
Current literature around lexical processing in SLI lends support to this nding that children with
SLI may have difculty with lexical-semantic processes such as lexical selection possibly due to poorly
dened and badly organized semantic representations at the lemma level (Alt & Plante, 2006;
Brackenbury & Pye, 2005; Lahey & Edwards, 1999; McGregor, Newman, Reilly, & Capone, 2002; Sheng &
McGregor, 2010a). On the other hand, strong evidence exists for an account attributing lexical pro-
cessing decits to weak underlying phonological representations in the lexicon and limited
phonological-lexical processing skills in children with SLI (Chiat, 2001; Seiger-Gardner & Brooks, 2008;
Velez & Schwartz, 2010). Lastly, both semantic and phonological decits are equally implicated in the
nature of word-learning decits in SLI (Kambanaros, Grohmann, et al., 2010; Kambanaros, Psahoulia,
et al., 2010; Nash & Donaldson, 2005).
To the best of my knowledge, the present study is the rst to focus on the retrieval of instrumental
verbs in children with a developmental language disorder such as SLI. The impetus for the research
stems from the fact that developmental lexical retrieval decits in SLI children appear very similar in
form to acquired lexical retrieval decits in adults (see Friedmann, Biran, & Dotan, 2012, for a rst
explanation of developmental anomia and its subtypes).
Instrumentality, a conceptual-semantic factor, has been shown to signicantly affect verb retrieval
either in a positive way by facilitating action naming in uent aphasia (Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998;
Jonkers & Bastiaanse, 1996, 2007; Kambanaros, 2009a; Kambanaros & van Steenbrugge, 2006) or in
a negative way by hindering verb retrieval in non-uent aphasia (Bastiaanse & Jonkers, 1998; Jonkers &
Bastiaanse, 1996, 2007)dor to have no effect on action naming irrespective of aphasia type (Kemmerer
& Tranel, 2000). Similarly, name relation, a phonological-lexical feature operating at the level of the
phonological word form, has revealed contradictory results on action naming in individuals with
aphasia: a positive effect on instrumental verbs with a name relation easier to retrieve than those
without (Jonkers & Bastiaanse, 1996, 2007; Kemmerer & Tranel, 2000), a negative effect (Bastiaanse,
1991; Kambanaros & van Steenbrugge, 2006), and no effect (Bastiaanse, 1991; Jonkers, 1998;
Kambanaros & van Steenbrugge, 2006).3
Given the evidence from the SLI literature so far, the hypothesis was that both instrumental verbs
(semantic complex) and name-related instrumental verbs (semantic phonological information)
should be more difcult to retrieve on a confrontation naming task for children with SLI compared to
non-instrumental verbs and non-name-related instrumental verbs, respectively. Children with SLI are
2
There were two examples of the verb cut, one with scissors and the other with a knife. The verb pin incorporated
a thumbtack.
3
In Bastiaanse (1991), two anomic patients were described: one demonstrated a negative effect of name relation on action
naming, whereas the other showed no effect whatsoever. In Kambanaros and van Steenbrugge (2006), a negative effect of name
relation was reported in L2 (English) and no effect in L1 (Greek) for 12 bilingual patients with anomic aphasia.
also predicted to perform signicantly worse on the action naming tasks compared to non-impaired
age-matched peers.
The target group in the present study are Greek Cypriot children, who grow up with their native
variety of Cypriot Greek in a diglossic setting, with Standard Modern Greek as the ofcial language
which they learn formally in the course of their childhood and education. With both varieties very
closely related to one another (see also Kambanaros, Grohmann, & Michaelides, in press), these chil-
dren will be termed bilectal.
While formal differences between the dialect (Cypriot Greek) and the standard language (Standard
Modern Greek) abound on the phonetic, phonological, morphological, and syntactic side (see discussion
and references in Grohmann & Leivada, 2012), these are irrelevant for single-word naming. The relevant
aspects of the two grammars are constant: both are highly inected linguistic varieties in which all word
forms (verbs) need to be properly inected, through [stem afx (afx)]. Of course, individual lexical
items may vary between the two varieties, but these are controlled for (see Section 3.2).
Beyond reporting whether Greek Cypriot children with SLI are less accurate on naming pictures of actions
than age-matched peers with typical language development (TLD), the aims of the study are three-fold:
1. to investigate the effect of instrumentality on action naming performances between children with
SLI compared to peers with TLD;
2. to investigate the effect of name relation on action naming performances between children with
SLI compared to peers with TLD;
3. to examine naming errors (i.e. semantic and/or phonological) made by children with TLD and
children with SLI with reference to adult models of the lexicon.
3. Method
3.1. Participants
Sixty-four children participated in this study, divided into three groups (see Table 1). The two
groups of children with TLD (20 pre-schoolers and 30 rst-graders) were recruited randomly from
three public primary schools and one kindergarten in the Nicosia district after approval from the
Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture and upon written parental consent. No child classied as TLD
had received speech and language therapy or special education services.
The fourteen children with SLI were recruited from speech and language therapists in public primary
education and/or therapists in private practice. All children with SLI were in mainstream education and
in the school grade corresponding to their chronological age. Twelve of the children were receiving
speech-language therapy prior to the study, and three of these had also special education services
separate from their classmates and the regular classroom (i.e. pull-in/out service model).
Subject selection criteria included a bilectal Greek-speaking background with both parents Greek
Cypriotdthat is, Cypriot Greek spoken at home and exposure to Standard Modern Greek limited to
media and the classroomdand no exposure to a third language. In addition, the children had no history
of neurological, emotional, or behavioral problems, their hearing and vision adequate for test purposes,
and they showed a normal performance on a screening measures of non-verbal intelligence or as
Table 1
Demographic information of the participants.
Pre-schoolers (n 20) First-graders (n 30) SLI (n 14)

Age in months 54.20 (SD 5.97) 77.69 (SD 3.16) 78.57 (SD 20.39)
Gender 60% males 50% males 71% males
Maternal education (mean) 3.90 (SD .72) 4.50 (SD 1.11) 3.36 (SD 1.22)
Instruction in Standard 5 h/day (25 h/week) 6 h/day (30 h/week) 6 h/day (30 h/week)
Modern Greek
Home language Cypriot Greek Cypriot Greek Cypriot Greek
Key: maternal education: 3 completion of lyceum, 4 diploma, 5 bachelor degree.

reported by school psychologist. Moreover, the children showed normal articulation and had no gross
motor difculties. All children came from families with a medium to high socio-economic status as
measured by mothers education using the database made available by the European Social Survey
(2010). The KruskalWallis test revealed that the three groups differed signicantly on mothers
education, c2 11.664, p .003. Pairwise MannWhitney tests showed that on mothers education
level, the age-matched TLD group were signicantly higher than the SLI group (z 2.871, p .004)
and the pre-school group (z 2.518, p .012). The SLI and pre-school groups did not differ signi-
cantly on mothers education (z 1.630, p .103).
The children with SLI were diagnosed prior to the study using a battery of norm-referenced tests for
Greek by two speech and language therapists (one being the author) as part of a larger investigation
(Theodorou, in preparation, but see already Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2012, for information regarding
the extensive test battery). Testing included measures of receptive and expressive morphosyntax,
receptive and expressive vocabulary and sentence recall from the Diagnostic Verbal Intelligence
Quotient Test (DVIQ: Stavrakaki & Tsimpli, 2000). The SLI group scored signicantly lower than age-
matched peers on all language measures. Childrens non-verbal performance was assessed using the
Ravens Coloured Progressive Matrices (Raven, Raven, & Court, 2000). The pre-school children with TLD
serving as the language-controls were matched with the SLI group based on their scores on the
standardized Greek version of the Renfrew Word-Finding Vocabulary Test (Renfrew, 1997) developed
by Vogindroukas, Protopapas, and Sideris (2009). Descriptive information about the background
testing of participants is presented in Appendix A.
3.2. Materials
The action naming subtest of the Cypriot Object and Action Test (COAT: Kambanaros, Grohmann, &
Michaelides, in press) consisting of thirty-nine colored photographs measuring 10 14 cm was
administered to assess lexical retrieval of action names. All verbs were monotransitive, picturable
actions with either simple internal word structures of [root afx] or more complex ones of
[root afx afx]. Actions were restricted to (perhaps outdated) stereotypical roles, that is, a woman
is shown performing household activities (e.g., sweeping), and a man is performing more traditional
duties (e.g., hammering). These stereotypical roles depicted in the pictures are deemed to be appro-
priate for this age and cultural group (see Durkin & Nugent, 1998).
Twenty-eight action names corresponded to an instrumental verb (IV), where an instrument
(i.e. not a body part) was part of the action (e.g., cutting), half of which each had a name relation to the
noun (IV NR), such as skupa broomskupizi sweeping, whereas the remaining half were instru-
mental verbs without a name relation (IVNR), such as stilo pengra writing, and eleven action
names corresponded to a non-instrumental verb (NIV), such as aneveni climbing. Individual target
verbs were measured on the number of syllables (written), word frequency, rated age of acquisition,
rated imageability, and rated picture complexity values (see Appendix B).
The means of these measures for each verb type are presented in Table 2. Assumptions for
a MANOVA comparison of the three verb types did not hold; the KruskalWallis test showed that the
three types of verbs differ signicantly on word frequency (c2 8.622, p < .001) and age of acquisition
(c2 6.469, p < .05) only. Pairwise comparisons of the three groups on word frequency and age of
Table 2
Means (and standard deviations) of measured psycholinguistic variables by verb type category.
IVNR IV NR NIV
No. of syllables 2.93 (1.00) 3.00 (.56) 2.82 (.60)
Word frequency .007029 (.018094) .001000 (.001113) .014845 (.019072)
Age-of-acquisition 2.68 (.51) 2.96 (.38) 2.51 (.45)
Word Imageability 6.48 (.15) 6.44 (.15) 6.34 (.20)
Picture complexity 6.15 (.67) 6.30 (.69) 6.10 (.69)
Key: IVNR instrumental verbs without a name relation, IV NR instrumental verbs with a name relation, NIV non-
instrumental verbs.
acquisition was carried out using the MannWhitney test with a level of signicance equal to
.05/3 .017 (Bonferroni correction). The difference between IVNR and IV NR was not signicant
according to the corrected level of signicance (z 2.027, p .043). NIV were signicantly higher on
word frequency than IVNR (z 3.012, p .003) and IV NR (z 3.920, p < .001). Pairwise
comparisons on age of acquisition revealed no signicant difference between IVNR and IV NR
(z 1.749, p .080) nor between IVNR and NIV (z .851, p .395). IV NR verbs appear to have
a signicantly higher age of acquisition than NIV (z 2.412, p .016).
3.3. Procedure
Participating children had to score 90% correct (with at most 4 incorrect responses) on the action
comprehension subtest of the COAT in order to be included in the naming study. The action
comprehension subtest of the COAT was given ten days prior to the naming study. The same photo-
graphs are used in both subtests. All action picture naming tasks were presented in one single session
and in random order. Testing was conducted individually in a quiet room provided at each of the
participating schools or nurseries by the author.
Children were asked to name the action in the photograph in a single word (one-word target
response). The stimulus question was: Tell me in one word: what is he/she doing?. Action names
were required in the third person singular present tense, since Modern Greek lost the innitive; the
citation form is typically the rst person singular present tensedin picture naming, it would be third
person, however, reecting the descriptive situation. Two examples were provided before testing. The
stimulus question was repeated once for children who did not respond. If no response was given, the
item was scored as incorrect. No time limits were placed and self-correction was allowed. Responses
were recorded and transcribed verbatim.
3.4. Qualitative analysis
Errors made by the children for the action names were classied into semantic errors, phonological
errors, grammatical word class substitutions, dont know responses, visual errors, and unrelated
responses. Semantic errors were divided into semantic types and semantic descriptions or circumlo-
cutions Semantic type errors included all semantically related single lexical labels for the target word
(e.g., threading for sewing). The latter type involved describing the target action/object concept using
more than one word (e.g., hitting the nail for hammering). Phonological errors included words that
share the same onset and number of syllables with the target verb. Grammatical word class or VtoN
substitutions were those where the object name was provided instead of the action name (e.g., instead
of the verb sweeping, the noun broom was produced). Visual errors included responses where there is
no semantic relationship between the childs response and the target action (e.g., clock for weighing).
Unrelated responses included real word responses lacking a relationship of any form with the target
action.
4. Results
4.1. Accuracy
Since the goal of this study was not to nd differences between the development of Cypriot Greek
versus Standard Modern Greek, appropriate single-word responses from either variety were counted
as correct (see Kambanaros, Grohmann, Michaelides & Theodorou, in press, for ner-grained discussion
of the different varieties). A total of 2496 responses to the pictured action stimuli were analyzed for
accuracy and/or error type: 546 responses for the SLI group, 1170 responses for the age-matched TLD
peers, and 780 responses for TLD pre-schoolers (vocabulary-matched: VM controls). Descriptive
statistics are presented in Table 3.
Across all three groups of children, performance on non-instrumental (NIV) was higher than on
instrumental verb (IV) retrieval. To rule out confounding non-semantic (e.g., phonological-lexical)
effects, only instrumental verbs without a name relation were compared to non-instrumental verbs.
Table 3
Means (and standard deviations) of accuracy on action naming by verb type for each participating group.
SLI TLD CA TLD LA

NIV .68 (.11) .81 (.09) .70 (.08)
IV .61 (.11) .76 (.10) .60 (.15)
IVNR .55 (.18) .70 (.11) .50 (.15)
IV NR .67 (.10) .82 (.11) .69 (.18)
Key: NIV-non-instrumental verbs, IV instrumental verbs, IVNR instrumental verbs without a name relation,
IV NR instrumental verbs with a name relation, SLI specic language impairment, TLD CA typically language
developing chronological age, TLD LA typically language developing language age.
For all three groups of children, performance on non-instrumental verbs was signicantly higher than
on instrumental verbs without a name relation; SLI: t(13) 2.91. p .01; TLDCA: t(29) 5.28,
p < .001; TLDVM: t(19) 7.04, p < .001. Within the instrumental verb type, verbs without a name
relation (IVNR) had lower accuracies than verbs with a name relation (IV NR). This difference was
signicant for all three groups; SLI: t(13) 2.40, p .03; TLDCA: t(29) 5.85, p < .001; TLDVM:
t(19) 6.40, p < .001.
To compare groups on accuracies on each verb type, a MANOVA test with NIV, IVNR, and IV NR as
dependent variables and group membership as the independent variable was performed. The multi-
variate test was signicant (Wilks lambda .58, F(6,118) 6.26, p < .001, partial h2 .24) indicating
that the three groups differ in accuracy on the three types of verbs. For NIV, the univariate test was
signicant; F(2,61) 14.30, p < .001. Scheff post hoc tests revealed that the TLDCA group out-
performed the SLI group (mean difference .13, SE .03) and the TLDVM group (mean
difference .12, SE .03). For IVNR, the univariate test was signicant; F(2,61) 13.45, p < .001. Post
hoc tests similarly revealed that the TLDCA group outperformed the SLI group (mean difference .15,
SE .05) and the TLDVM group (mean difference .20, SE .04). For IV NR, the univariate test was
also signicant; F(2,61) 8.46, p .001. Post hoc tests revealed that the TLDCA group outperformed
the SLI group (mean difference .14, SE .04) and the TLDVM group (mean difference .13, SE .04).
Differences between the SLI and the TLDVM groups were not signicant in any of the comparisons.
4.2. Error types
Only the signicant error types and patterns will be discussed in this section. Overall, semantic
description errors were the most frequent error type, followed by semantic errors and by omissions.
The TLDCA group had fewer percentages of errors (of all three types) than the other two groups, with
the latter two behaving similarly on error patterns. Group error means by type of verb category and
errors are presented in Table 4.
With regards to semantic description or circumlocution errors for instrumental verbs (IV) compared
to non-instrumental verbs (NIV), paired t-tests showed that there were no signicant differences on
error percentages for IV compared to NIV for any of the three groups: SLI t(13) .68, p .51, TLDCA
t(29) .22, p .83, TLDVM t(19) .52, p .61. On the contrary, the number of semantic
description errors were signicantly more for the IVNR versus the IV NR verbs for the TLD groups
only: SLI t(13) 1.42, p .18, TLDCA t(29) 2.75, p .01, TLDVM t(19) 3.04, p < .01. The corre-
sponding non-parametric Wilcoxon signed rank test concurred with the aforementioned ndings.
Error percentages on the four types of verbs were not signicantly different for the three groups of
children (Wilks lambda .92, F(6,118) , p .53).
Semantic errors predominated for IV compared to NIV for the TLD groups: SLI t(13) 1.34, p .20,
TLDCA t(29) 3.06, p < .01, TLDVM t(19) 5.18, p < .01. For all three groups, semantic errors
appeared more often for instrumental verbs without a name relation to the noun compared to
instrumental verbs with a name relation to the noun: SLI t(13) 2.35, p .04, TLDCA t(29) 6.50,
p < .01, TLDVM t(19) 5.32, p < .01. Non-parametric results were in accordance with the above. Group
comparisons revealed differences in semantic errors among the three groups of children: Wilks
lambda .70, F(6,118) 3.84, p .002. Univariate tests were also signicant for group differences in
Table 4
Group mean percentages of errors by verb category and type of error.
Verb category/error type Group
SLI TLDCA TLDVM

NIV
Semantic Errors .084 .021 .036
Semantic Circumlocutions .156 .145 .191
Omissions .071 .018 .064
IV
Omissions .082 .025 .070
IVNR
Omissions .071 .019 .075
IV NR
Omissions .092 .031 .064
Key: NIV non-instrumental verbs, IV instrumental verbs, IVNR instrumental verbs without a name relation,
IV NR instrumental verbs with a name relation, SLI specic language impairment, TLDCA typically language developing
chronological age, TLDVM typically language developing vocabulary match.
semantic errors in all four verb categories. Next only the signicant differences in the post hoc Scheff
comparisons are presented: on NIV, the children with SLI committed more semantic errors than the
TLDCA (mean difference .06, SE .02); on IV, SLI and TLDVM children had more semantic errors
compared to the TLDCA group (mean differences .06 and .08, SE .02 and .02 correspondingly); on
IVNR, the younger TLD group had more semantic errors than their older counterparts (mean
difference .11, SE .03); and similarly on IV NR, the younger TLD had more semantic errors than
their older counterparts (mean difference .05, SE .02).
Fewer than 10% of all responses were omission errors. Paired t-tests showed that there were no
signicant differences on omission error percentages for IV compared to NIV for any of the three
groups: SLI t(13) .45, p .66, TLDCA t(29) .86, p .38, TLDVM t(19) .40, p .70. The differences
in omission error percentages were not signicant between the IVNR and the IV NR categories
either: SLI t(13) 1.00, p .37, TLDCA t(29) .96, p .34, TLDVM t(19) .65, p .53.
Moreover, only the signicant differences in the post hoc Scheff comparisons are presented: on
NIV, the TLDCA group performed less omission errors than the other two groups but the level of
signicance was marginally over .05. On instrumental verbs, the TLDCA children had signicantly
fewer omission errors than the children with SLI (mean difference .06, SE .02) and the TLDVM
children (mean difference .04, SE .02). On IVNR the older TLD group committed fewer omission
errors than the younger ones (mean difference .06, SE .02), while on IV NR, the older TLD group
had signicantly less omission errors than the SLI group (mean difference .06, SE .02).
5. Discussion
The present study investigated action picture naming accuracy for instrumental, non-instrumental,
name-related instrumental, and non-name-related instrumental verbs in two groups of Greek Cypriot
children in a highly inected language, Modern Greek, where verbs are clearly differentiated on the
basis of inectional sufxes; one group of children with typical language development (TLD, split
further into age- and vocabulary-matched) and children with specic language impairment (SLI). The
verbs under investigation did not differ in argument structure complexity; this was kept constant
(monotransitive, i.e. argument structure with one internal argument), as manipulation occurred with
regards to lexical-semantic or phonological features of the verb.
The rst aim was to explore the effect of instrumentality, a semantic-conceptual feature, on action
naming performances in children with SLI as compared to age- and vocabulary-matched younger
controls. Instrumentality operates at the level of the lemma and the prediction followed, given that
children with SLI are reported to have underspecied semantic lemma representations, that specic
verbs which are semantically complex would be more difcult to retrieve than verbs with less semantic
features. This prediction was supported by the greater number of accurate responses for non-
instrumental verbs (NIV: 68% correct) compared to instrumental verbs (IV: 55% correct) for the chil-
dren with SLI. However, the same pattern was shown by the age-matched typically developing children
(NIV: 81% correct vs. IV: 70% correct) and the vocabulary-matched typically developing children (NIV:
70% correct vs. IV: 50% correct). Overall, children with SLI (mean age: 6.9 years) showed similar
accuracy levels to the vocabulary-matched children (mean age: 4.7 years), revealing that the lexical-
semantic processing skills of the SLI group are delayed (by over two years)dbut not deviant.
Furthermore, knowledge of verb meanings was assessed only by means of a comprehension task in
which children had to select the appropriate photograph (out of four) to match the spoken verb. All
participating children, those with SLI and those with TLD, scored at least 90% correct on the verb
comprehension subtest of the COAT in order to be included in the naming study. Altogether children
knew sufcient details about the target verb, each time, to distinguish it from the words corresponding
to the other photographs in the set. It is obvious, then, that this task could be achieved on the basis of
partial, or incomplete, semantic and/or phonological representation of the target verb.
It is possible, then, that the quantitative differences in naming accuracy between the two verb types
was due to effects of word frequency (a variable operating at the level of the word form), since the non-
instrumental verbs had a higher word frequency than IVNR, making them potentially easier to
retrieve. However, at least two arguments challenge this proposition. First, a large body of literature
now supports that age-of-acquisition (i.e. the age at which a word is rst learned), which has its locus
in the semantic system, might be a better predictor of difculties with lexical retrieval, particularly for
picture naming tasks, since a single (unique) concept must be selected leading to increasing compe-
tition in the conceptual system (see Brysbaert & Ghyselinck, 2006). In the present study, the two verb
types did not differ on age-of-acquisition measures. Second, the predominant error type in the present
study, i.e. semantic errors (described in detail below), are independent of frequency effects (see Nickels
& Howard, 1994). Finally, frequency ratings were based on a written corpus for Greek and not on
spoken language counts.4
Given that instrumental verbs (IV) compared to non-instrumental verbs (NIV) were signicantly
difcult for all children, with typically developing rst-graders showing the smallest verb gap differ-
ence between the two types, suggests that as children mature and their semantic lexicon undergoes
restructuring, they progress from encoding semantically less specic to semantically more specic
verbs (de Jong, 1999). Linking this nding to the semantic complexity hypothesis (Breedin et al., 1998),
children with SLI and typically developing peers in this case demonstrated a hierarchical top-down
approach to semantic verb knowledge, that is, general verbs were available (e.g., make, do, put),
specic verbs were retrieved (e.g., clean, hit, x), but the most specic verbs (e.g., mop, hammer, build),
those with a larger number of semantic features (i.e. [instrument]) were yet to be acquired in many
instances, particularly for several members of the SLI group and younger non-impaired children.
Indeed, it has been observed that typically developing children as old as 11 years are still in the process
of eshing out the semantic representations of specic verbs (Pye, Loeb, Redmond, & Richardson, 1995)
but empirical evidence is lagging behind.
The second aim was to investigate the effect of name relation, a phonological-lexical feature, on
action naming performances in children with SLI compared to TLD peers. Name relation operates at the
level of the word form or lexeme, and the prediction followed that name-related instrumental verbs
would be more difcult to retrieve than non-name-related ones, given that children with SLI are
4
Lemma frequencies for object and action names were calculated based on the printed word frequency count for Standard
Greek (Hatzigeorgiou et al., 2000). Please note that empirical evidence for age-of-acquisition such as based on the MacArthur-
Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI), for example, is not yet available for either Standard Greek or Cypriot Greek.
However, the author has recently been awarded the CDI rights to devise a Cypriot Greek version of the CDI and (ii) a bilingual
Cypriot GreekStandard Greek version for research purposes within COST Action IS0804. Also, the COAT photographs are
currently being rated across 23 languages for familiarity and name agreement as part of the COST Action IS0804.
reported to have weak underlying phonological representations and limited phonological-lexical

processing skills. This prediction was not met, as children with SLI were signicantly more success-
ful in retrieving name-related instrumental verbs (IV NR: 67% correct) compared to non-name-
related instrumental verbs (IVNR: 55% correct). The same pattern was shown by the age-matched
typically developing children (IV NR: 82% correct vs. IVNR: 70% correct) and the vocabulary-
matched typically developing children (IV NR: 69% correct vs. IVNR: 50% correct). Once again,
the performance of the SLI group was signicantly lower than age-matched peers (TLDCA) but similar
to vocabulary-matched controls (TLDVM), revealing that the phonological-lexical processing skills of
the children with SLI are considerably delayed (2 years behind)dbut not atypical.
The results regarding the facilitatory effect of name relation on action naming are incompatible with
Levelts (1989) two-stage model referred to in the introduction, as the model does not assume upward
activation. Instead, the effect will need to be described within the Spreading Activation Theory (Dell,
1986). The assumption is that the additional phonological information or co-activation of the noun
lemma raises the activation threshold for the phonological representation of the target verb lexeme
(Jonkers, 1998). This means that the children in the present study were able to capitalize on the lexical
information to access the instrumental verb such as skupizi sweeping only if the phonological
representation of the corresponding noun such as skupa broom was successfully activated. Yet,
a language-specic explanation for Greek could be that, when a stem/root was highly activated and
sustained (for either a verb or a noun) and in light of intact morphological or grammatical class pro-
cessing per se (see Kambanaros, Grohmann, & Michaelides, in press), children were able to retrieve the
name-related instrumental verb lexeme without having to access the noun per se.
The third aim was to examine naming errors made by children with and without SLI in with
reference to models of the adult lexicon (Levelt, 1989). Different error patterns in children (and adults)
can give an indication of different levels of breakdown, although errors may arise as a result of a decit
at a number of different levels. For example, semantic errors (i.e. words semantically related to the
target) are often indicative of a semantic level problem. Phonological errors, that is, errors that are
phonologically related to the target, suggest a decit in accessing the phonological form of the word or
subsequent processes. Unrelated errorsdfor example, when no word related to the target is activated
(either words or non-words)dcan reveal a breakdown at more than one level.
In the present study, inectional errors (i.e. sufxation) were absent, thus any impairment at the
level of morphological processing was ruled out. Likewise, no phonological errors were made in spoken
production by participating children, revealing that phonological representations for action names
were intact. Semantic errors were the predominant error type followed by omission errors.
Semantic descriptions or circumlocutions were the largest semantic error type committed, but no
signicant difference for this error was revealed between IV and NIV nor between IVNR and IV NR
for the SLI group. Similarly, both groups of typically developing children showed a similar pattern with
the former but not with the latter i.e. signicantly more semantic description errors for IVNR
compared to IV NR. Childrens semantic circumlocutions of target verbs included a description of one
or more components of the action involved (e.g., sweeping the garden for raking, hitting the nail
with a hammer for hammering, or mixing the food with a spoon for stirring), giving an indication of
the target meaning. Nevertheless, responses reveal that childrens semantic representations were
partial and not rich enough to allow stronger activation levels and more associations (e.g., the
instrument, manner, or core meaning) to activate the target action name.
Furthermore, children relied on the use of GAP verbs (e.g., make, do, put), producing structures such
as making food for cooking or putting glue for gluing. One suggestion is that the (over)use of GAP
verbs by typically developing children is a compensatory strategy when unable to access semantically
complex verbs from long-term memory (Kambanaros & Grohmann, 2010; Stavrakaki, 2000). Also,
repeated encounters with high-frequency, generic GAP verbs may result in the formation of stronger
representations in the mental lexicon, making them more accessible.
Semantic type errors were the second-most common error on all verb types investigated for both
groups of children (SLI and TLD). Even for a simple action, several components are involved (e.g., agent,
intention, direction, manner of movement, instrument, patient, and result) and may well be part of
a coordinated series of actions (e.g., sweeping is part of pushing a broom). As such, several (instru-
mental) verbs each emphasizing a different subset of components or a different part of the series were
often mapped onto another verb (e.g., sweeping, mopping, and raking were all mapped onto the generic
verb cleaning).
Only for the SLI group did the difference in semantic errors fail to reach signicance between the
two verb types (IV vs. NIV). Age-matched controls committed signicantly fewer semantic errors for
IVs compared to the SLI group and the younger non-impaired children. With regards to NIV, the only
signicant difference was between the SLI group and the age-matched controls, with the former
committing more semantic errors for this verb type than the latter. In contrast, all three groups showed
a signicant difference for semantic errors on IVNR and IV NR with more semantic errors produced
for the instrumental verbs without a name relation to the noun.
Omission errors (including dont know responses) did not result in any signicant differences for
any of the verb types within or across the groups of participating children. The older typically devel-
oping children made signicantly fewer omission errors for IVs compared to the younger non-impaired
children and to the SLI group. Similarly, the older TLD children made fewer omission errors than
younger peers for IVNR and on IV NR compared to the SLI group. This error type is attributed to
weak form representations (i.e. fewer associative connections in the mental lexicon), with no activation
of a lexical entry above its threshold to allow retrieval of the target lexeme information (Levelt, 2001).
Most importantly, error type did not discriminate across verb categories for the SLI groupdneither
quantitatively nor qualitatively. All in all, school-aged children with SLI under investigation demon-
strated signicant difculties organizing and/or accessing semantic and lexical knowledge about action
names, irrespective of verb type.
Semantic errors arose when the target word node was relatively unavailable and semantically
related ones were activated and produced instead. Such errors can stem from (i) the absence of one or
more semantic features (e.g., presence of an instrument, manner, etc.) from the mental representation
of the instrumental verb, making it more difcult to access within the network because of fewer
semantic associates or lexical connections to activate the target action (e.g., xing instead of
hammering, building, or drilling); (ii) incomplete phonological representations; and/or (iii) transient
activation levels that were too weak to allow the target to surface so a semantic competitor was highly
activated instead (see Levelt, 2001, on all points).
The large number of semantic errors for action names reects the particular challenges in naming
verbs, given that there are too many ways to interpret them (Gentner, 2006) or equally that they have
too many semantic competitors given their polysemous nature (de Jong, 1999). Recent research has
shown that typically developing children may have difculties deactivating semantic competitors due
to poor (not yet adult-like) inhibitory processing skills (Huang & Snedeker, 2011) or in the case of SLI an
inefcient suppression mechanism (Andreu, Sanz-Torent, & Guardia-Olmos, 2012; Seiger-Gardner &
Schwartz, 2008). Moreover, inhibitory mechanisms are developmentally constrained that is, as chil-
dren get older they become better at inhibiting inappropriate lexical items from reaching sufcient
activation to evoke selection and later retrieval (Hanauer & Brooks, 2005).
In the same light, maturationally speaking, a slower processing speed might hamper childrens
ability to simultaneously activate/deactivate phonological and semantic representations, given that
lexical access in children is less automated and demands more resources (for TLD, see Huang &
Snedeker, 2011; for rst research on children with SLI, see Mainela-Arnold, Evans, & Coady, 2010;
Seiger-Gardner & Schwartz, 2008). The application of this line of research to lexical retrieval break-
down in SLI warrants further investigation.
Relating the results of the present research to the ndings from the aphasia literature on instru-
mentality and name relation reported in the introduction section, the following points can be made:
verb retrieval in SLI is not facilitated by semantic complexity such as instrumentality as in cases of
individuals with anomic aphasia (see Jonkers & Bastiaanse, 1996, 2007; Kambanaros, 2009a;
Kambanaros & van Steenbrugge, 2006, and references within), that is, the automatic co-activation of
the instrumental noun lemma did not facilitate activation of the instrumental verb lemma. In fact,
children with SLI seem to perform more like individuals with a Brocas aphasia (i.e. a negative effect of
instrumentality). Further research on Brocas aphasia and SLI is needed to formulate this observation
into a testable hypothesis (see Bastiaanse & Bol, 2001, on lexical-semantic performance as measured by
verb diversity in the two impaired populations).
Yet, since the grammatical complexity of the verb was simple (i.e. monotransitive), the difculty of
the children with SLI did not lie in the grammatical information contained in the lemma, as is usually
the case for Brocas aphasia (Kim & Thompson, 2000), but in the non-grammatical or lexical-semantic
information instead (see Fig. 1). Verb breakdown in this case can be assumed to be within the lexical-
semantic node of the lemma, while the lexical-syntactic component is intact. This suggests that access
from the semantic lexicon to the phonological lexicon was not mediated by the syntactic lexicon or that
Fig. 1. A model depicting the breakdown in (instrumental) verb retrieval within the lexical-semantic node of the lemma.
the latter was bypassed when naming at the single-word level on a picture confrontation naming task
(see Biran & Friedmann, in press, for explanations from aphasia).
Another exciting prospect based on the instrumentality results is in reference to the Regression
Hypothesis (see Caramazza, 1994), which has served well to explain when forms of language loss in
brain-injured adults appear similar to the performance of young (and/or language-impaired) children
at some stage of lexical acquisition. With regards to semantically complex (instrumental) verbs, recent
evidence from patients with semantic dementia has revealed a hierarchical bottom-up decit of action
semantic knowledge in which the more specic verbs (e.g., to peel) were the rst to be lost (see Meligne
et al., 2011, for a detailed explanation), mirroring the pattern shown in the present study by children
with and without SLI. Once again, however, more research is warranted, to determine the exact nature
of the similarities or decit.
With regards to name relation, the results support what is summarized by Jonkers and Bastiaanse
(2007), one of a positive effect of verbnoun name relation on action naming for anomic aphasia. This
nding is also in line with the rst evidence from a cross-modal picture-word interference study
involving children with SLI (Seiger-Gardner & Schwartz, 2008) that clearly showed a phonological
facilitation effect of lexical retrieval. This means that phonological information makes lexical access
easier and a phonological decit is not the cause of the verb-naming difculties in the present study.
Lastly, the relevance of the results for clinical practice is of paramount signicance. In a recent study
investigating whether semantic or phonological encoding cues improved word retrieval in young
children with TLD or SLI, Gray and Brinkley (2011) found that instead of helping, the different encoding
cues had a detrimental effect on word learning. Based on the nding from the present studydthat
instrumental verbs with a name relation were the easiest to retrieve of the semantically complex verbs
attesteddraises the possibility that a combination of semantic and phonological cues may be more
benecial in teaching children complex word (verb) forms than therapists seeing a trade-off between
semantic and/or phonological information. For clinical practice, then, language activities that
strengthen the links between semantic and phonological information, through such processes as
associative learning based on specicity and semantic relatedness, would enhance the learning of
semantically complex verbs in school-aged children with SLI.
Furthermore, the ndings of the present study suggest that the lexical impairment involving verbs
revealed by the picture naming tasks for children with SLI is lexical-semantic in nature. This is sup-
ported by the major error type: semantic errors (mainly circumlocutions) arose when the target verb
node was relatively unavailable and semantically related ones were activated and produced instead.
This result introduces the importance of semantic neighborhood size, an under-researched variable
particularly for studies investigating verb retrieval that may inuence the occurrence of semantic
errors. That is, the number of semantic errors tends to rise when many semantic competitors are
available as opposed to errors of omission which are more frequent when there are few competitors
(see Bormann, Kulke, Wallesch, & Blanken, 2008, for evidence from aphasia). This variable may play
a role in the design of future studies investigating word production in children with language
impairments.
To conclude, the lexical impairment for children with SLI involving different verb types revealed by
the picture naming tasks was non-grammatical in nature. Generally speaking, the SLI group were less
accurate in naming semantically specic verbs compared to typically language developing age and
vocabulary-matched peers; interestingly, however, error type cannot differentiate the two groups. This
strongly suggests that children with SLI are delayeddbut not atypicaldin the development of their
verb lexicon. Similar ndings for English (Rice, 2003, 2009; Sheng & McGregor, 2010a, 2010b) can now
be supported further with this result from Greek. Finally, future research investigating the neural
underpinnings of verb processing and retrieval in individuals with SLI, particularly in relation to the
structural and functional development of Brocas area, should provide useful insights (see Badcock
et al., 2011).
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Michalis Michaelides for his diligence in the statistical analysis of the results. My
thanks to Kleanthes Grohmann for fruitful discussions on theoretical issues raised by the research.
Appendix A. Mean scores (standard deviations) of children with SLI, age-matched peers (on the
range of tests administered) and language-matched peers (on the word-nding vocabulary test)
Tests TLDCA SLI

Ravens Colored Progressive Matrices 85.4 (standard)
DVIQ morphosyntax (23 items) 19.9 (2.11) 12.3 (2.09)
DVIQ comprehension of morphosyntax (31 items) 26.4 (2.46) 22.4 (1.84)
DVIQ sentence repetition (16 items*3 points) 46.8 (1.80) 40.8 (2.70)
DVIQ vocabulary (27 items) 22.3 (1.58) 15.7 (2.20)
DVIQ metalinguistic abilities (25 items) 20.1 (2.45) 17.5 (1.29)
Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (204 items) 79.3 (32.02) 69.3 (16.63)
Athina Test word denition subtest (20 items) 15.0 8.3 (2.34)
30.2 (7.90) 27.5 (3.83)
Renfrew Word-Finding Vocabulary Test (50 items) TLDLA (mean score)
26.8 (2.72)
Key: SLI (children with) specic language impairment; TLD (children with) typical language development;
CA chronological age-matched; LA language age-matched; DVIQ Diagnostic Verbal IQ Test.
Appendix B. All verb items with number of syllables, frequency ratings, rated age of acquisition,
rated imageability, and rated picture complexity values
Verb in Greek Transcription Translation Syllables Frequency Mean age of Imageability Picture
acquisition complexity
IVNR
zugra4zi zwgrazei drawing 4 .0039 2.00 6.60 5.95
kar4ni karfonei hammering 3 .0008 3.60 6.55 6.55
sragoydi* tragoudaei singing 4 .0060 2.08 6.70 6.40
gr4i grafei writing 2 .0695 2.28 6.65 6.40
anakasi* anakateuei stirring 5 .0005 2.64 6.40 5.30
kbi* kovei cutting 2 .0063 2.32 6.55 6.45
plni* plenei washing 2 .0011 2.28 6.50 6.70
mazi* mazeuei raking 3 .0037 2.64 6.40 4.25
jari* psareuei shing 3 .0005 3.00 6.45 6.65
magiri* mageireuei cooking 4 .0013 2.32 6.60 6.60
cszi xtizei building 2 .0026 2.92 6.25 5.85
b4i vafei painting 2 .0007 2.92 6.55 6.40
rbi ravei sewing 2 .0004 2.96 6.15 6.55
srbri servirei serving 3 .0011 3.56 6.40 6.10
IV NR
poszi potizei watering 3 .0007 2.76 6.60 6.85
anbi* anavei lighting 3 .0037 2.84 6.45 6.65
srbi* trivei grating 2 .0012 3.08 6.45 6.35
xyrzi ksyrizei shaving 3 .0002 3.76 6.55 6.45
zygzi zygizei weighing 3 .0018 3.40 6.45 6.70
csnzi xtenizetai combing 3 .0002 2.28 6.65 6.80
skoypzi* skoupizei sweeping 3 .0009 2.48 6.55 6.70
kolli* kollaei glueing 3 .0027 2.64 6.50 6.45
klidni kleidwnei locking 3 .0005 2.96 6.40 5.60
sidrni siderwnei ironing 4 .0000 3.00 6.40 6.75
srypi* trypaei drilling 3 .0000 3.24 6.40 6.05
s4yrzi* sfyrizei whistling 3 .0016 3.24 6.20 6.00
s4oyggarzi sfouggarizei mopping 4 .0000 2.72 6.45 6.65
xni* ksynei sharpening 2 .0005 3.04 6.10 4.25
NIV
srabi* travaei pulling 3 .0065 2.88 6.25 6.00
anbani anevainei climbing 4 .0170 2.68 6.30 6.65
blpi vlepei looking 2 .0700 2.12 6.55 6.05
sslni stelnei sending/ 2 .0180 3.40 5.90 6.20
posting
dni denei tying 2 .0036 2.68 6.30 5.65
csypi* xtypaei ringing 3 .0085 2.28 6.30 4.75
4ori* foraei wearing 3 .0071 2.64 6.40 5.10
(continued )
Verb in Greek Transcription Translation Syllables Frequency Mean age of Imageability Picture
acquisition complexity
4oyskni fouskwnei blowing 3 .0012 2.76 6.40 6.40
koimsai koimatai sleeping 3 .0056 1.84 6.65 6.75
kqsai kathetai sitting 3 .0113 2.00 6.20 6.70
diabzi diavazei reading 3 .0145 2.32 6.45 6.80
Key: * verbs with alternative phonological responses in Cypriot Greek, verb with alternative lexical responses in Cypriot
Greek, IVNR instrumental verbs without a name relation, IV NR instrumental verbs with a name relation to the noun,
NIV non-instrumental verbs.
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Does verb type affect action naming in specic language

* Corresponding author. Tel.: 357 22 89 51 94; fax: 357 22 75 03 10.

2. Background to the study

Pre-schoolers (n 20) First-graders (n 30) SLI (n 14)

Key: maternal education: 3 completion of lyceum, 4 diploma, 5 bachelor degree.

3.4. Qualitative analysis

SLI TLD CA TLD LA

4.2. Error types

Verb category/error type Group

SLI TLDCA TLDVM

reported to have weak underlying phonological representations and limited phonological-lexical

Tests TLDCA SLI

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