Symbolically speaking: Communicating with blissymbols in aphasia

Abstract

Two severely aphasic patients were taught logographic symbols as an alternative medium of communication. The question of interest was whether logographic symbol communication would provide a superior medium relative to their residual natural language abilities. The natural language abilities of each patient were investigated in three different transcoding tasks—oral reading, writing to dictation and aural-visual matching—and the cognitive processes available to each patient in these tasks were identified. The learning of logographic symbols mirrored each patient's natural language performance and was consistent with the use of the spared cognitive processes identified as available for natural language processing. It was concluded that logographic symbols provided no communicative advantage to these patients compared with their processing of alphabetically written language.