Evaluación de los déficits sintácticos en la afasia: un estudio sobre la comprensión de oraciones en orden canónico y no canónico.

Abstract

Syntactic deficits have been documented in people with different aphasia profiles. This work aims to show the design of a test that allows to assess comprehension in Spanish with three specific sentences types: active, passive and object cleft. The former presents canonical Subject-Verb-Object structural order, while the other two present the inverse order. Four people with aphasia (PWA) and a control group of 18 subjects without lesions or language disorders matched for age and level of education participated in the study. The results showed that the patient group had lower performance than the control group, evidencing a PWA profile with alterations in sentence comprehension. Furthermore, the performance of the PWA group attested the expected canonicity effect-- it was significantly better for active sentences than for the other two structures. The designed test turns out to be a sensitive and useful instrument for the assessment of syntactic deficits in aphasia.