Analysis of auditory comprehension performance in individuals with severe aphasia

This research compared the performance of 20 individuals with global and mixed nonfluent aphasia across the four auditory comprehension subtests of the Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination (Word Discrimination, Body Part Identification, Commands, and Complex Ideational Material) and across the six subcomponents of the Word Discrimination Subtest (objects, actions, letters, colors, forms, and numbers). As expected, group means revealed severely reduced performance which was equally observable across all auditory comprehension tasks. To determine whether individual subjects demonstrated a pattern of consistently reduced performance for auditory comprehension tasks, z-scores and chi-square statistics were also calculated for each subject and task. The individuals with global aphasia demonstrated a greater number of statistically significant z-scores than was expected by chance. This was not true for the subjects with mixed nonfluent aphasia. Results of this research indicate that although as a group individuals with global aphasia may demonstrate consistently reduced auditory comprehension, when considered on an individual basis, this group may comprise a somewhat divergent population with respect to the configuration of preserved and impaired auditory comprehension skills.