Short-term memory and sentence comprehension in Catalan aphasia.

The main goal of the present study is to investigate visual and verbal short-term memory side to side with sentence comprehension in Catalan-speaking subjects with aphasia in comparison with subjects without brain damage. We aim to examine whether there are any significant correlations between their performance on short-term memory and comprehension tasks in order to evaluate the hypothesis that linguistic and memory deficits in aphasia are the result of a dysfunction of a common mechanism, usually short-term memory. Eigthy-four control subjects and twelve individuals suffering from different types of aphasia were assessed using the Catalan version of the Comprehensive Aphasia Test (CAT-CAT), which includes one recognition task and two digit and word span tests to evaluate visual and verbal short-term memory, respectively, as well as a sentence-to-picture comprehension task. The results showed that the performance of subjects with aphasia was significantly low on all tasks. Yet, the logistic regression analysis revealed that the magnitude of the differences between the control and experimental group varied across subtests, and that visual short-term memory was better preserved than verbal memory. The results also showed that there were no significant correlations between memory and language comprehension, which rules out the hypothesis that the deficits observed are due to a common underlying mechanism. Individual variation was also observed, specially on memory subtests, which suggest that memory impairments cannot explain the comprehension deficit in aphasia.

The discrimination of intonational contours in Broca's aphasia.

The observation has been made that agrammatic speakers fail in the comprehension of various sentence types, and this behaviour has been attributed to diminished syntactic capabilities, under the unverified assumption that perception of intonation is intact. Here we re-examine this assumption experimentally with a language, Catalan, which allows for intonation to be the only variable over four sentence types (declaratives, yes-no questions, topicalisations and contrastive focus constructions). We conducted a discrimination task with 10 agrammatic and 10 age- and education-matched control subjects. The subjects were asked to decide whether sentence pairs were identical or not. The overall agrammatic performance was very accurate (89.1% versus 95.6% correct of the controls). The aphasic participants performed above chance in six out of seven conditions. The results indicate that agrammatic individuals succeeded in the task and that their perception of intonation is spared. We conclude that failure in comprehension in agrammatism cannot be attributed to prosodic disruption.