Silvia Martínez-Ferreiro UDK 81’234.2 Centre for language and Cognition (CLCG) Originalan naučni rad University of Groningen Sabina Halupka-Rešetar Faculty of Philosophy University of Novi Sad VERBAL DEFICITS IN APHASIA: EVIDENCE FROM NATIVE SPEAKERS OF SERBIAN 1 Deficits in word retrieval are commonly attested in aphasia. These have a major impact in verbs, especially after lesions causing the emergence of Broca’s aphasia. Verbs are not only complex entities, but the core of the sentence, and constitute a central issue for both the proper understanding of language deficits, and assessment and recovery purposes. In this paper, we review the existing literature describing the speech of Serbian-speaking individuals with aphasia to explore the degree of preservation of verbal forms in this population. The role of different factors – such as the nature of the verb, its argument structure and the morpho- logical markers attached to it – are discussed and contrasted in these lines against the multi- ple hypotheses proposed so far in the search for a unified explanation. Key words: action words, argument structure, inflectional morphology, Serbian Deficits in the production and comprehension of verbs have been widely re- ported in the field of aphasiology (Miceli, Silveri, Villa and Caramazza, 1984; Saffran, Berndt and Schwartz, 1989; Zingeser and Berndt, 1990; Thompson, Sha- piro, Li and Schendel, 1994; Bastiaanse and Jonkers, 1998; Bastiaanse and Ed- wards, 2004; Lee and Thompson, 2004; among many others). In this paper, we focus on the existing data from Serbian-speaking individuals with aphasia, and pursue a generalized explanation of verb deficits in current linguistic terms. To do so, we have structured this paper as follows: in the section 1, we provide a definition of aphasia together with a summary of the main cross-linguistic find- ings in the field. Section 2 reviews the different hypotheses proposed to explain 1 s.martinez.ferreiro@rug.nl Acknowledgements: The first author acknowledges support of the research grant Beatriu de Pinós (AGAUR) and the project FFI2010-20634 (Micinn). The second author acknowledges funding from project nr. 178002 of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology of the Republic of Serbia, entitled Languages and Cultures in Time and Space. Special thanks also to the audience of the Workshop Clinical Linguistics in Serbian, held at the University of Novi Sad in 2012. The linguistic classification of the individuals with aphasia has been noted as in the original source. 107 Ƚɨɞɢɲʃɚɤ Ɏɢɥɨɡɨɮɫɤɨɝ ɮɚɤɭɥɬɟɬɚ ɭ ɇɨɜɨɦ ɋɚɞɭ, Ʉʃɢɝɚ XXXIX-2 (2014) Annual Review of the Faculty of Philosophy, Novi Sad, Volume XXXIX-2 (2014)