ITRW on Experimental Linguistics Athens, Greece August 28-30, 2006

Towards Empirical Dimensions for the Classification of Aphasic Performance

Athanassios Protopapas (1), Spyridoula Varlokosta (2), Alexandra Economou (3), Maria Kakavoulia (4)

(1) Institute for Language & Speech Processing, Maroussi, Greece
(2) Department of Mediterranean Studies, University of the Aegean, Greece
(3) Department of Psychology, University of Athens, Greece
(4) Department of Communication, Media, and Culture, Panteion University, Greece

We present a study of 13 patients with aphasia, not screened by presumed subtype, showing strong correlations among disparate measures of fluency and measures of receptive and expressive grammatical ability related to verb functional categories. The findings are consistent with a single underlying dimension of severity. We suggest that subtyping be re-examined in light of performance patterns and only accepted when patient clustering is empirically derived and theoretically meaningful.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Protopapas, Athanassios / Varlokosta, Spyridoula / Economou, Alexandra / Kakavoulia, Maria (2006): "Towards empirical dimensions for the classification of aphasic performance", In ExLing-2006, 205-208.