Cognitive impairment of aphasics in a colour-to-picture matching task

Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics, non-aphasic brain-damaged patients and chronic schizophrenics were tested in a colour-to-picture matching task. For each of 42 black-and-white drawings of objects the most "typical" colour was to be selected from a set of 24 colour strips. Separate scores for the appropriateness of the choices as to hue, brightness, and saturation were obtained by comparison with the data from 50 normal Ss. The choices of both aphasic groups were more deviant than those of brain-damaged controls for chromatically coloured objects with respect to all three colour dimensions, and for achromatically coloured objects with respect to saturation and brightness. Wherever the aphasics' performance was worse than that of the controls, the deviancy-scores correlated significantly with the Token Test. Results are interpreted as an impairment of aphasics in the ability to isolate analytically specific features of objects or concepts which might be conceived of as a prerequisite of propositional language.