The relationships between conceptual and semantic-lexical disorders in aphasia.
A nonverbal test of conceptual thinking was administered to 55 normal controls and to 203 patients with monohemispheric brain lesions (74 aphasics and 129 nonaphasic brain-damaged patients), in order to study the relationships between conceptual impairment of aphasic patients and breakdown of the semantic-lexical level of integration of language. A very high number of aphasic patients (54 out of 74) and a limited number of nonaphasic brain-damaged subjects (31 out of 129) obtained a pathological score on the test of conceptual thinking, but only some components of the aphasic symptomatology seemed closely linked to the conceptual disorder. In fact a non-significant relationship was found between conceptual impairment and: ("fluent" or "non-fluent") clinical type of aphasia; severity of aphasic disturbance. On the contrary, a strong relationship was found between conceptual disorder and impairment of the semantic-lexical level of integration of language. These findings seem to show that conceptual disturbance and semantic-lexical troubles are closely linked in aphasia.
D001037:Aphasia / Q000523:psychology*; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D001041:Aphasia, Wernicke / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology*; D001925:Brain Damage, Chronic / Q000523:psychology; D003210:Concept Formation; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary