[Acoustic and semantic disturbances of comprehension in aphasia]

The authors carried out a verbal auditory comprehension test on 115 aphasic patients, 44 patients suffering from a left hemispheric lesion without aphasia and 120 normal subjects used as acontrol group. The test also revealed either disorders in acoustico-phonemic discrimination or difficulities in semantic differentiation. The main aim of the research was to check experimentally the theory propounded by Alajouanine and colleagues (1964) according to which, in Wernicke's aphasia, it is possible to demonstrate a twofold correlation between disorders of comprehension and speech disorders both phonemic and semantic. Only one part of the theory of Alajouanine and colleagues has been confirmed by our experiments for our results have shown that there is a very close correlation between semantic paraphasias and disorders of semantic differentiation whilst no correlation can be found between phonemic paraphasias and disturbances in auditory phonemic discrimination.