Abstract
For 36 aphasic patients, two sets of tasks were designed in order to investigate the facilitation effect of onomatopoeia, compared with adverbs, for auditory comprehension and production of verbs. In the auditory comprehension task, onomatopoeias had facilitation effect as a cue, but the effectiveness of adverbs for verb comprehension was not confirmed. Among the onomatopoeias, only those which represent the action well, facilitated the auditory comprehension of verbs. In the verbal production task, a marginally significant advantage was seen for the more effectiveness of onomatopoeias than adverbs. The cues were thus divided into two ranks based on the stability of connection to the following target verbs. The cues of high stability rank significantly more facilitated verb speech than those of low stability. Onomatopoeias, especially those which have stable connection to following target verb, have an advantage in the effectiveness as a cue to facilitate aphasic patients' verbal production of verbs.
