Aphasic Patients' Memory Span and Syntactic Comprehensive Ability

Hayata Hiroko, Nojima Keiko, Fujita Ikuyo

doi:10.11219/jjcomdis1983.2.43

This paper discusses the relation between aphasic patiens' memory span and syntactic comprehensive ability. The subjects were 15 Broca's, 15 Wernicke's aphasics and 10 non-brain-damaged adults. They performed a verbal memory span test and an auditory comprehension test, the latter consisting of two tests. The stimuli of the first test of auditory comprehension were designed to examine the quantity of information which each subject could process, They had the same grammatical structure but varied in length. Those of the second were constructed to examine the quality of information which each subject could process. Thy had the same length but different grammatical structures. The results showed the following: a) Aphasic patients' verbal memory span was significantly reduced when compared with the control group's. b) Aphasic patients who retained more verbal items could comprehend longer sentences. c) There was no relation between aphasic patients' ability to retain more verbal items and their ability to comprehend more difficult grammatical structures. Consequently we suggest that capacity to retain many words is advantageous to the quantitative aspect of processing information, but it does not have any influence on the qualitative aspect of processing information.

Aphasic Patients' Memory Span and Syntactic Comprehensive Ability

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