Pictorial and Graphemic Processing in Fluent Aphasia

Abstract

Some research suggests that people with aphasia may have deficits in processing pictorial materials; other studies suggest this is contradictory. Moreover, it is not known how these potential deficits compare to deficits in graphemic processing. The purpose of this study was to examine pictorial processing in individuals with fluent aphasia, and how it compares to their graphemic processing. Three people with fluent aphasia were administered three computer based expectation tasks. Participants were required to determine if the final stimulus in a sequence of four was congruent or incongruent with the preceding three stimuli. Two tasks were administered, one using simple object pictures, and the other using pictorial action scenes. A corresponding graphemic condition was also administered that was composed of category words. The dependant variables analyzed were percent correct and reaction time. Overall, the participants performed more accurately on both pictorial conditions as compared to the graphemic condition. Contrasting reaction time and accuracy patterns are noted for each type of fluent aphasia represented in the study. It is necessary to investigate the pictographic competency of each individual with aphasia to determine relative strengths and weaknesses. It appears that in some people with aphasia, language is not the only modality to suffer damage following a stroke. Investigation of therapeutic uses for pictographs and other nonverbal materials may provide an opportunity to reduce frustration associated with other modalities such as reading, writing, and verbal comprehension in people with fluent aphasia.

Visual narrative comprehension: Universal or not?

“…Also, the choice of sequence endings was worse for right than left hemisphere damaged patients (Bihrle, Brownell, Powelson, & Gardner, 1986), but they differed in their errors: right hemisphere damaged patients chose structurally well-formed but incoherent endings, while left hemisphere damaged patients chose coherent but less structurally intact endings. Finally, recognition of congruity for a sequence-ending image was less accurate and took longer for a Wernicke's aphasic than patients with conduction aphasia or anomia (Stead, Savage, & Buckingham, 2012).…”

“…Comics or instruction manuals are generally assumed to be simple and universally comprehended, underlying their use in intelligence testing and clinical assessments (Kaufman & Lichtenberger, 2006;Wechsler, 1981), and as stimuli in a wide range of anthropological and experimental research. A presumed accessibility has placed visual narratives in practical contexts like instructions (Martin & Smith-Jackson, 2008;Spinillo & Dyson, 2001) and humanitarian aid materials (Fussell & Haaland, 1978;Stenchly, Feldt, Weiss, Andriamparany, & Buerkert, 2019), and has underscored efforts advocating for using comics in education (Cary, 2004;Sousanis, 2015) and science and health communication (Farinella, 2018;M. J.…”

Dismantling the “Visual Ease Assumption:" A Review of Visual Narrative Processing in Clinical Populations

“…They compared aphasic patients (both fluent and non‐fluent) to patients with right‐hemisphere damage and found a double dissociation such that the aphasic patients made more errors on the linguistic version, whereas the right‐hemisphere patients made more errors on the picture version. Stead, Savage, and Buckingham () found that patients with fluent aphasias performed better on a sequence completion task (participants determined whether the final stimulus in a sequence was congruent or incongruent with the preceding items) for sequences of pictures compared to sequences of words. Therefore, both of these studies demonstrate that for these groups of aphasic patients, narrative comprehension was easier when stories were presented visually compared to linguistically, which supports Prediction #2.…”