Assessing semantic comprehension: Methodological considerations, and a new clinical test

Abstract

Most tests designed to assess semantic comprehension involve confronting the patient with an array of pictures including a target and a set of semanticallyrelated items, and asking him to select the one which matches a spoken word. These tests are defective on several counts. First, they do not give the patient the opportunity to make errors other than semantic errors, so that a patient who makes errors because of auditory perceptual problems, or because of nonlinguistic factors such as reluctance to scan the full array, will appear to have a “semantic” disorder. Second, many of the semantic distractors used in such tests are visually similar to the target (e.g., knife and spoon, sheep and goat), so that errors might arise for perceptual rather than linguistic reasons. The test materials described here have proved useful in distinguishing receptive semantic problems from perceptual deficits.