title: Idiom comprehension in aphasic patients.
abstract: Idiom comprehension was assessed in 10 aphasic patients with semantic deficits by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Patients were also submitted to an oral explanation of the same idioms, and to a word comprehension task. The stimuli of this last task were the words following the verb in the idioms. Idiom comprehension was severely impaired, with a bias toward the literal interpretation. Very few errors were produced with words, making impossible to establish a correlation between comprehension of idioms and of individual words. The difficulties in idiom comprehension seemed to be due to the fact that patients rely on a literal-first strategy, accessing a figurative interpretation only when the linguistic analysis fails to yield acceptable results.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy. costanza.papagno@unimib.it
authors.forename: Costanza
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Papagno
authors.forename: Patrizia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Tabossi
authors.forename: Maria Rosa
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Colombo
authors.forename: Patrizia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Zampetti
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001037:Aphasia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D001308:Auditory Perceptual Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis; D032882:Comprehension; D004193:Discrimination Learning; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007806:Language Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception