Effect of Stimulus Variables on Verbal Perseveration of Dysphasic Subjects

Abstract

Oral responses were received from 33 dysphasics to word stimuli counterbalanced according to abstraction level, part of speech, length, and frequency of occurrence, and presented through the visual, auditory, and visual-auditory modalities. The results indicated that: through the visual modality, words of high and medium abstraction level produced significantly more perseveration than low, while through the auditory and visual-auditory modalities no significant differences were found; regardless of modality no significant differences existed among nouns, verbs and adjectives; regardless of modality long words produced significantly more perseveration than short; regardless of modality no significant differences existed between words of frequent and infrequent occurrence in the language; regardless of abstraction level, part of speech, word length and frequency of occurrence, the visual modality produced significantly more perseveration than the auditory and visual-auditory modalities, except in the case of words of high abstraction level where the auditory mode produced significantly more perseverations than the visual-auditory modality.