Dipartimento di Scienze Umane, University of Udine, Udine, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2012 Jul;50(8):1787-93. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.04.003. Epub 2012 May 5.
Anomic aphasia is a disturbance affecting lexical retrieval. Nonetheless, persons with this disorder may also experience difficulties in the construction of coherent narratives. Whether this symptom is a sign of a macrolinguistic difficulty per se or reflects the lexical disorder is still an open debate. In order to analyze the effect of the lexical impairment on macrolinguistic processing, we compared the narrative skills of a group of ten participants with chronic anomic aphasia with those of ten healthy control individuals matched for age and educational level. The anomic participants produced narratives with lowered speech rate, reduced mean length of utterance, fewer grammatically well-formed sentences, more semantic paraphasias. The macrolinguistic analysis showed that they also produced more errors of cohesion and global coherence and fewer lexical information units. Interestingly, their levels of thematic selection were normal. A bivariate correlational analysis showed a strong correlation between the production of errors of cohesion and production of complete sentences, and between production of errors of global coherence and lexical information units. These correlations showed that aspects related to lexical retrieval may affect macrolinguistic processing during the construction of a narrative. Indeed, it is suggested that lexical deficits lead to two main consequences: First, patients with anomia frequently interrupt the utterances they are producing and this reduces the levels of sentence completeness and the overall degree of cohesion across the utterances; Second, they use strategies to cope with the lexical impairment and produce a quantity of lexical fillers and repetitions that, clustered in utterances, reduce the levels of global coherence.
命名性失语症是一种影响词汇检索的障碍。然而，患有这种疾病的人也可能在构建连贯的叙述时遇到困难。这种症状是否本身就是宏观语言困难的标志，或者反映了词汇障碍，仍然是一个悬而未决的争论。为了分析词汇损伤对宏观语言处理的影响，我们比较了十名慢性命名性失语症患者和十名年龄和教育水平匹配的健康对照组参与者的叙述技能。命名性失语症患者的语速降低，平均话语长度减少，语法正确的句子减少，语义替代增多。宏观语言分析还表明，他们还产生了更多的衔接错误和整体连贯性错误，以及更少的词汇信息单位。有趣的是，他们的主题选择水平正常。双变量相关分析显示，衔接错误的产生与完整句子的产生之间，以及整体连贯性错误的产生与词汇信息单位之间存在很强的相关性。这些相关性表明，与词汇检索相关的方面可能会影响叙述构建过程中的宏观语言处理。事实上，有人认为词汇缺陷会导致两个主要后果：第一，命名性失语症患者经常中断他们正在说出的话语，这降低了句子的完整性水平和整个话语的衔接程度；第二，他们使用策略来应对词汇损伤，产生大量的词汇填充词和重复词，这些词在话语中聚集在一起，降低了整体连贯性水平。
