%0 Journal Article
%T Verbal Comprehension Ability in Aphasia: Demographic and Lexical Knowledge Effects
%A Panagiotis G. Simos
%A Dimitrios Kasselimis
%A Constantin Potagas
%A Ioannis Evdokimidis
%J Behavioural Neurology
%D 2014
%R 10.1155/2014/258303
%X Background. Assessment of sentence-level auditory comprehension can be performed with a variety of tests varying in response requirements. A brief and easy to administer measure, not requiring an overt verbal or a complex motor response, is essential in any test battery for aphasia. Objective. The present study examines the clinical utility of receptive language indices for individuals with aphasia based on the Comprehension of Instructions in Greek (CIG), a variant of the Token Test, and the Greek version of PPVT-R. Methods. Normative data from a large community sample of Greek adults aged 46¨C80 years was available on both measures. A word-level-independent measure of auditory comprehension was computed as the standard score difference between the two tests and used to compare patients with and without comprehension deficits as indicated by their Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination profile. Results and Conclusions. Indices of internal consistency and test-retest reliability were very good. Education and age effects on performance were significant, with the former being stronger. The potential clinical utility of differential ability indices (contrasting sentence- and word-level auditory comprehension tests) is discussed. 1. Introduction Auditory comprehension is one of the major components of general linguistic ability and many individuals with aphasia demonstrate comprehension deficits. These deficits are commonly associated with lesions in various left hemisphere regions, including the posterior middle temporal gyrus, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, the superior temporal sulcus, the angular gyrus, and frontal areas BA 46 and BA 47 [1]. In general, auditory comprehension is assessed at two levels: at the word level (word level auditory comprehension, henceforth WLAC) and at the sentence level (sentence level auditory comprehension, henceforth SLAC). In clinical settings, comprehension of spoken sentences is considered more critical and predictive of overall linguistic and social functioning and requires a set of intact cognitive functions, including lexical/semantic access (primarily tapped by WLAC tasks), syntactic processing, and working memory [2¨C4]. The ability to extract meaning from spoken sentences can be assessed with a variety of task formats. Some tests were specifically designed to assess processing of particular syntactic sentence frames, such as the Sentence Comprehension Test of the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences [5, 6], the Subject-relative, Object-relative, Active, Passive syntactic battery [7], and the
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/bn/2014/258303/