The comprehension of ambiguous idioms in aphasic patients

Idiom Processing in Aphasic Patients

“…The dual testing procedure employed in this study proved to be of paramount importance, since the results of the two experiments differed significantly. As it was signaled in previous research (Papagno et al 2004;Cacciari et al 2006), depending on the engagement of different modalities governed by the activity of the brain, such as auditory comprehension, visual encoding, creative thinking, inference making, the obtained score may fluctuate. I endeavoured to broaden the outlook on the issue by demonstrating that even within the scope of one type of testing procedure, namely a multiple choice comprehension task, discrepant results can be gathered depending on the options made available for selection.…”

“…Secondly, the modality of testing is expected to exert influence on the final outcome of the study. It was shown in previous research (Papagno et al2004;Cacciari et al 2006) that in the case of brain-damaged individuals the availability of a literal interpretation of an idiom works as a strong bias in favour of this meaning. Therefore, the absence of a literal option in Task 2 should be mirrored in higher scores obtained by the language-impaired subjects on this task, when juxtaposed with the outcome of Task 1.…”

“…Another pattern which emerged from the analysis of the data is the preponderance of literal errors over unrelated mistakes. Several modes of explanation have been provided to account for this tendency in Cacciari et al's (2006Cacciari et al's ( : 1311 study. The authors posit that the idiom recognition mechanism can be impaired in patients with brain damage, who fail to recognise the figurative nature of the expression.…”

“…The selection of such a wide array of phrases in the present experiment stemmed from the objective to examine if the recognition of an idiom's correct, non-literal meaning varies according to internal characteristics of the phrase. As Cacciari et al (2006Cacciari et al ( : 1306 contended, "it cannot be excluded that different processing mechanisms might be involved in processing different types of idioms". In accordance with this hypothesis, my prediction is that opaque and incorrect idioms will be less likely to be understood literally than the transparent items, because in the latter case, literal paraphrases may profoundly distract the patient due to their seeming plausibility.…”

“…As a consequence of the recent criticisms of various testing paradigms used in the past experiments on aphasiacs, including the string-to-picture matching task and oral definition task (Cacciari et al 2006;Papagno and Caporali 2007), these methods were rejected. Instead, I decided to utilise two multiple choice comprehension tasks.…”