RESUMEN
Nonambiguous idiom comprehension was assessed in 15 right brain-damaged (RBD) and 12 left brain-damaged (LBD) aphasic patients by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Idiom comprehension was found to be severely impaired with a bias toward literal interpretation. The RBD patients, though impaired, performed significantly better than LBD patients; their performance was correlated with visuospatial abilities and was significantly affected by lesion site. The results of this study suggest that the performance of RBD patients in the comprehension of idiomatic sentences may be affected by (a) an involvement of the frontal lobe and/or (b) visuospatial deficits that may impair their performance on the picture-matching task.
Asunto(s)
Daño Encefálico Crónico/psicología , Lateralidad Funcional/fisiología , Lenguaje , Pruebas Neuropsicológicas , Adulto , Anciano , Afasia/psicología , Educación , Femenino , Lóbulo Frontal/fisiología , Humanos , Masculino , Persona de Mediana Edad , Psicolingüística , Caracteres Sexuales , Percepción Espacial/fisiología , Percepción Visual/fisiologíaRESUMEN
The ability to understand ambiguous idioms was assessed in 15 aphasic patients with preserved comprehension at a single word level. A string-to-word matching task was used. Patients were requested to choose one among four alternatives: a word associated with the figurative meaning of the idiom string; a word semantically associate with the last constituent of the idiom string; and two unrelated words. The results showed that patients' performance was impaired with respect to a group of matched controls, with patients showing a frontal and/or temporal lesion being the most impaired. A significant number of semantically associate errors were produced, suggesting an impairment of inhibition mechanisms and/or of recognition/activation of the idiomatic meaning.
Asunto(s)
Afasia/fisiopatología , Comprensión/fisiología , Psicolingüística/métodos , Semántica , Adulto , Anciano , Análisis de Varianza , Afasia/patología , Aprendizaje Discriminativo/fisiología , Femenino , Humanos , Pruebas del Lenguaje/estadística & datos numéricos , Masculino , Persona de Mediana Edad , Estadísticas no ParamétricasRESUMEN
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.
