Summary
The ability of aphasic patients to comprehend sentences involving the combination of two linguistic operations was tested in a sentence/picture matching task. Sentences included affirmative, negative, uncompared and comparative types. Aphasic patients had significantly greater difficulty in understanding negative-comparative constructions than sentence types involving only a single operation. Comparison of the responses of the aphasic patients with data obtained in a perceptual comparison task revealed that a subgroup of patients had marked difficulty in integrating information in both tasks. The results are interpreted as an indication that some aphasic patients are especially disturbed in their ability to combine several operations in the construction of semantic representations for sentences. It is further argued that this deficit may extend to an inability to integrate information in the perceptual/spatial domain, as suggested by Luria in his discussion of the syndrome of semantic aphasia.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Caramazza, A., Berndt, R.S.: Semantic and syntactic processes in aphasia: A review of the literature. Psychol. Bull. 85, 898–918 (1978)
Caramazza, A., Brownell, H., Berndt, R.: Naming and conceptual deficits in aphasia. Paper presented at the meeting of the Academy of Aphasia, Chicago, October, 1978
Clark, H.H.: Linguistic processes in deductive reasoning. Psychol. Rev. 76, 387–404 (1969)
Luria, A.R.: Traumatic aphasia. The Hague: Mouton 1970
Luria, A.R.: Basic problems of neurolinguistics. The Hague: Mouton 1976
Luria, A.R.: Disturbances of grammatical operations in semantic aphasia. Neurolinguistics 6, 169–176 (1977)
Martin, R., Caramazza, A.: Classificiation in well-defined and ill-defined categories: Evidence for common processing strategies. J. Exp. Psychol. General (In press)
Tucker, L.R., Messick, S.: An individual differences model for multi-dimensional scaling. Psychometrika 28, 333–367 (1963)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
The research reported here was supported by NIH research grant 14099 to The Johns Hopkins University. We would like to thank Dr. Annamaria Basili, Chief, Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology, Fort Howard Veterans Administration Medical Center, for permission to test the patients. We are indebted to the entire staff of that department for their continued cooperation, and for their many useful comments on the research reported. We also thank Michael Giordano, Conrad Selnick, and Susan Baisley for their assistance in data analysis. A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of B.A.B.B.L.E., Niagara Falls, Canada, March, 1979
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Berndt, R.S., Caramazza, A. Semantic operations deficits in sentence comprehension. Psychol. Res 41, 169–177 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00308654
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00308654