Dysphasic speech responses to visual word stimuli

Effect of Stimulus Variables on Verbal Perseveration of Dysphasic Subjects

Oral responses were received from 33 dysphasics to word stimuli counterbalanced according to abstraction level, part of speech, length, and frequency of occurrence, and presented through the visual, auditory, and visual-auditory modalities. The results indicated that: through the visual modality, words of high and medium abstraction level produced significantly more perseveration than low, while through the auditory and visual-auditory modalities no significant differences were found; regardless of modality no significant differences existed among nouns, verbs and adjectives; regardless of modality long words produced significantly more perseveration than short; regardless of modality no significant differences existed between words of frequent and infrequent occurrence in the language; regardless of abstraction level, part of speech, word length and frequency of occurrence, the visual modality produced significantly more perseveration than the auditory and visual-auditory modalities, except in the case of words of high abstraction level where the auditory mode produced significantly more perseverations than the visual-auditory modality.

[Readability of words as a function of their parts of speech in aphasics. A contribution to the definition of anomia (author's transl)]

Definitions of anomia as a symptom of aphasia have been classified into three categories. Some frequently cited experimental studies designed to establish a rank order of difficulty for parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs) have been briefly evaluated. An experiment has been conducted with 18 mild adult aphasics who were required to read lists of words which were controlled with respect to length, frequency of occurrence and part of speech. The results show that the linguistic category of part of speech has a highly significant influence on readability. Nouns are easier to read than adjectives and these easier than verbs. This finding does not necessarily contradict many definitions of anomia, though it calls into question the validity of many widely accepted interpretations. The results were explained in terms of phrase structure and dependence grammars.

Wh-questions: responses by aphasic patients

The syntactic relationship between wh-questions and their answers was investigated in the speech of aphasic subjects. The subjects were twenty-two aphasic patients whose mean age was 39.7 years and whose mean severity rating on the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination was 2.63. The data revealed significant differences in the frequency of correct response among types of wh-questions and a limited set of response strategies for incorrect answers. The results are discussed in terms of language theory with implications for language assessment and remediation.

Effect of stimulus variables on dysphasic verbal errors

Reanalysis of oral responses from 32 dysphasics to word stimuli counterbalanced according to abstraction level, part of speech, length, and frequency of occurrence, and presented through the visual, auditory and visual-auditory modalities, indicated that: through the visual modality, high and medium abstract words produced significantly more verbal errors than low; through the visual-auditory modality, medium abstract words produced significantly more verbal errors than low, while through the auditory modality no significant differences were found. Regardless of modality, verbs and adjectives produced significantly more verbal errors than nouns, while no significant difference was found between verbs and adjectives; regardless of modality, long words produced significantly more verbal errors than short; regardless of modality, infrequent words produced significantly more verbal errors than frequent words. Regardless of abstraction level, part of speech, word length, and frequency of occurrence, the visual produced significantly more verbal errors than the auditory and visual-auditory modalities, except in the case of words of medium abstraction level where the visual-auditory modality produced significantly more verbal errors than the auditory modality.