Conceptual Impairment in Aphasia

Abstract

Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics, brain-damaged patients without aphasia, and chronic schizophrenics were tested in a non-verbal matching task where the subject had to indicate which of two pictures was more closely linked to a clue picture. Both aphasic groups performed worse than brain-damaged controls when the identification of individual attributes or actions shared by clue and referent was required, but were unimpaired when the two had a set of referential-situational associations in common. Factor analyses including 8 additional verbal and nonverbal reference tasks resulted for both groups in two factors, one of which represents general Language Impairment. For the Broca’s aphasies this factor was closely related to general organic deficit as measured by the Trail Making Test; for the Wernicke’s aphasies it was associated with tasks which might be considered illustrative of analytical competence in isolating and comparing individual features of objects or concepts.

An extended version of this paper is to appear in Brain and Language (1980) under the title ‘Analytical competence and language impairment in aphasia.’