The Relationship Between Word Association and Grammatical Classes in Aphasia

Abstract

A word association test consisting of five each of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, and prepositions was administered orally to fifty aphasic and fifty nonaphasic patients. Associations were scored homogeneous (same part of speech as the stimulus) or heterogeneous (not the same part of speech as the stimulus). Aphasics gave the same proportion of homogeneous responses to each part of speech as nonaphasics, although aphasics gave a significantly smaller total number of homogeneous responses. Syntagmatic (completion) responses and paradigmatic (same part of speech) responses were negatively correlated in both groups. It was concluded that (1) aphasics show a significantly lower number of homogeneous responses than nonaphasics; (2) aphasic word association behavior follows the same general pattern of variance by part-of-speech as that of nonaphasics; (3) syntagmatic and paradigmatic responses are negatively correlated in both aphasics and nonaphasics.