Communicative effectiveness in Broca's aphasia.

The purpose of this study was to investigate communicative effectiveness in aphasia. Five patients with Broca's aphasia and five neurologically normal subjects participated in referential communication and spontaneous conversation tasks. Performance on the referential tasks was used to derive measures of communication success, learning, and efficiency. A representative sample of utterances from the referential tasks and 100 utterances from the spontaneous conversation task also were analyzed to determine the frequency of operationally defined errors in speech, lexical access, grammar, content, discourse, and use. Results suggest that patients with Broca's aphasia retain communicative effectiveness in the presence of significant speech and language deficits and experimentally imposed constraints on the use of visual and gestural communication modalities.