Aphasia As Seen by the Aphasic

Comprehension of abstract and concrete commands by high and low level aphasic subjects : effects of presentation mode

“…Message length. The fact that most aphasic clients have a reduced verbal retention span highlights the importance of length as a stimulus factor and has received support from a number of sources, including aphasic patients themselves (Rolnick and Hoops, 1969). Factors that affect the length of the verbal message include sentence length (McMahon, 1963;Weidner and Lasky, 1976) and the number of critical vocabulary elements within a sentence (Shewan and Canter, 1971), both of which have been found to affect auditory comprehension.…”

“…Goodglass et al (1970) found that all of their aphasic subjects were deficient, to some degree, in auditory sequential pointing span (ability to listen to series of nouns and then point, in the same order, to the corresponding pictures). Additionally, Albert (1976) indicated that information load and sequencing deficits are characteristic of aphasia regardless of the clinical type (anterior or posterior) • Marshall (1981) suggests these data emphasize the necessity of maintaining control of the auditory stimulus presented to the patient and that patients will generally process shorter messages more efficiently than longer messages.…”

“…The alerting signals used with patients presenting an attentional deficit may not be as useful with these patients. Marshall (1981) suggests delivering successive verbal messages in close proximity so as to inhibit the individual's auditory system from returning to a passive state.…”

“…implying the presence of significant deficits in granunatical processing. As Duffy (1981) suggests, the syntax and the interaction between syntax and the semanticlogical relationships among the words within a sentence should be considered when devising sentence comprehension tasks.…”

“…Redundancy. Duffy (1981) and Marshall (1981) point out that the potential detrimental effects of increasing message length may be negated as a function of message redundancy.…”