COMPARATIVE PERFORMANCE OF SEVERE APHASICS IN THE COMPREHENSION, REPETITION, NAMING, AND READING OF PERSONALLY-RELEVANT LANGUAGE VERSUS EXTRAPERSONAL LANGUAGE.

摘要

It was the purpose of this study to formally investigate whether or not severe aphasic patients have better performance using personal language materials as compared to otherwise-similar extrapersonal language materials.;The patients responded to the personal and extrapersonal portions of four language tasks: auditory comprehension, speech repetition, naming, and reading comprehension. The repetition and naming tests consisted of words which were matched across the personal and extrapersonal portions for Thorndike-Lorge word-frequency. Stimuli for the auditory comprehension and reading comprehension tests were sentences. The personal and extrapersonal portions of these tests were also matched for word-frequency, as well as for sentence structure and number of critical words per item. Although word-frequency was matched using the Thorndike-Lorge count, judgments of relative spoken word-frequency (made by hospitalized neurologically-normal subjects) for the personal and extrapersonal words on the naming test indicated that word-frequency values did, in fact, differ for the two different types of language content, such that personally-relevant words were higher in spoken word-frequency than were the extrapersonal words.;The aphasic patients responded to the personal and extrapersonal portions of each of the four tasks. Test order was counterbalanced. Analysis of the obtained data led to the following conclusions: (1) Overall performance of the aphasics for the personally-relevant language materials were significantly better than their performance for the extrapersonal language materials. (2) Personal language information was easier than extrapersonal language information for the aphasics in all modalities tested--auditory comprehension, speech repetition, naming, and reading comprehension. (3) Better language performance was noted on the personal language materials as compared to the extrapersonal language materials for both diagnostic groups tested in this study, mixed anterior aphasics and Wernicke's aphasics. (4) Patients with severe aphasia tend to maintain similar standing when performing with personally-relevant language materials as they do when dealing with parallel extrapersonal language materials. (5) Insofar as personally-relevant language materials were judged to be of higher frequency in day-to-day spoken language (despite having been equated for Thorndike-Lorge frequency), the differential effects of higher word-frequency as opposed to the personal nature of the language materials cannot be determined from the present data.;Generalizations from these findings must be made with caution, because the present sample included only patients with severe language impairment and because the language behaviors evaluated were of necessity fairly simple. One cannot predict with certainty whether or not these results apply to aphasics with mild or moderate language impairments. Similarly, it is uncertain what effect the personal-extrapersonal aspect of language content would have on patients' performance with more linguistically-complex materials.;The subjects for this study were twenty-four severe aphasic adults, sixteen mixed anterior aphasics and eight Wernicke's aphasics, who had a mean age of sixty-two years and a mean education level of eleven years. All subjects were aphasic as a result of a single cerebrovascular accident.;Implications of the findings to diagnosis and treatment with aphasic adults were discussed. In addition, suggestions for follow-up research were presented.