Verbal memory and sentence comprehension in aphasia: A case series

ABSTRACT

This case series explores the relationship between verbal memory capacity and sentence comprehension in four patients with aphasia. Two sentence comprehension tasks showed that two patients, P1 and P2, had impaired syntactic comprehension, whereas P3 and P4’s sentence comprehension was intact. The memory assessment tasks showed that P1 and P2 had severely impaired short-term memory, whereas P3 and P4 performed within the normal range in the short-term memory tasks. This finding suggests an association between short-term memory deficit and sentence comprehension difficulties. P1 and P3 exhibited impaired comparable working memory deficits, suggesting a dissociation between working memory and sentence comprehension.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• memory
• sentence comprehension
• stroke
• language

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the individuals who participated in this study, especially PWA. We would also like to thank Prof David Caplan for discussing the results and possible interpretations. The first author received research funding from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY), the Alexander Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and the A.G. Leventis Foundation. The second author was supported by IKY Scholarships Programme co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the action entitled “Reinforcement of Postdoctoral Researchers”, in the framework of the Operational Programme “Human Resources Development Program, Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) 2014 – 2020.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the A.G. Leventis Foundation;Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY);Alexander Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.