Table 1. Scores on lexical and grammatical processing tests.
| Test | Chance score | S.A. | S.O. | P.R. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ADA spoken word picture matching | 16.5 | 60/66* | 61/66* | 60/66* |
| ADA written word picture matching | 16.5 | 62/66* | 57/66* | 66/66* |
| ADA spoken synonym matching | 80 | 123/160* | 145/160* | 121/160* |
| ADA written synonym matching | 80 | 121/160* | 112/160* | 139/160* |
| PALPA 54 spoken picture naming | — | 0/60 | 0/60 | 1/60 |
| PALPA 54 written picture naming | — | 24/60 | 0/60 | 2/60 |
| Comprehension of spoken reversible sentences | 50 | 49/100 | 32/100 | 38/100 |
| Comprehension of written reversible sentences | 50 | 42/100 | 43/100 | 49/100 |
| Written grammaticality judgments | 20 | 26/40 | 35/40* | 21/40 |
| PALPA 13 digit span (recognition) | — | 3 items | 5 items | 4 items |
Tests are taken from the Action for Dysphasic Adults (ADA) Auditory Comprehension Battery (36) and the Psycholinguistic Assessments of Language Processing in Aphasia (PALPA) (37) or were devised for the purposes of this study. Spoken and written word comprehension was assessed by word-picture matching and synonym judgment tests, with the latter permitting evaluation of lower-imageability nonpicturable words. Word-picture matching tests required a stimulus word (spoken or written) to be matched to a corresponding picture in the presence of visual, phonological/orthographic, and semantic distracters. Synonym judgment tests involved decisions as to whether two words (spoken or written) had similar meanings. Lexical retrieval was assessed through spoken and written picture-naming tests. Grammatical processing was evaluated by comprehension of reversible spoken and written sentences, a written grammaticality judgment test, and collection of samples of spontaneous and elicited spoken and written output. The reversible sentence comprehension tests required matching of a spoken or written sentence to the corresponding pictured event in the presence of a distracter picture showing the reversed roles of the protagonists (e.g., “The man killed the lion” and “The lion killed the man”). The stimulus sentences included equal numbers of active and passive sentences to prevent use of an order-of-mention strategy in decoding the sentence (e.g., assuming that the first-mentioned noun is the subject of the sentence). The grammaticality judgments test required the patient to decide whether a written sentence was grammatical. This task was not performed in the phonological modality to avoid prosodic cues influencing grammaticality judgments. Each patient's short-term phonological memory capacity was determined by a digit span test. Span was established in a recognition paradigm in order to eliminate speech production problems from the task. The patient decided whether two auditorily presented strings of numbers were the same or different. —, impossible to calculate chance score.
Scores significantly above chance (P < 0.01 level)