engleski

Word processing abilities of persons after stroke and TBI: insights from error analyses

Acquired language disorder is a common consequence of stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI). For years researchers have aimed to describe and compare the symptomatology of these two neurological disorders, yet their specificities remain unclear. The purpose of this study was to observe word processing abilities of persons after stroke (PaS) and TBI (PaTBI), by focusing on errors they produce. Guided by the assumptions of the logogen model (Patterson & Shewell, 1987), several questions were formed: 1) are there between-group differences in word comprehension, naming and reading ; 2) which types of errors dominate in a particular group ; 3) do the groups differ in types of errors they produce. Significant between-group differences were expected, with prevalence of phonological errors in PaS, and semantic errors in PaTBI. Individuals (22 PaS and 22 PaTBI) were tested using four tasks from Comprehensive aphasia test- Croatian (CAT-HR ; Swinburn et al., 2020). PaTBI significantly outperformed PaS in naming and reading, but both groups exhibited neologisms, phonological, semantic and unrelated errors, although in different proportions. In word comprehension and naming tasks PaTBI primarily exhibited semantic errors, while PaS had equally distributed phonological and semantic errors. In reading, both groups predominantly produced errors on a phonological level. The groups differed only in naming ; PaTBI exhibited significantly more semantic errors than did the PaS group. In conclusion, PaS do not necessarily perform worse on all language aspects compared to PaTBI, and TBI does not imply completely intact lower level language processing. Importantly, even though a comprehensive error analysis can be insightful, one should not expect a particular profile of language disturbances in stroke and in TBI patients. Of all examined tasks, naming differentiated these individuals the most. Error produced by PaTBI are significantly more semantically conditioned than are those produced by PaS.

stroke ; traumatic brain injury ; word processing ; error analysis ; logogen model

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