Quantitative studies on speech characteristics of aphasics. A statistical approach to vocabulary

The paper presents a linguistic-statistical study of the vocabulary and word-frequency as well as of the variety and frequency distribution of the parts of speech. Ten aphasics were studied in comparison with 10 normal controls. A corpus of 2,500 words was collected in each subject by means of a standard-interview. A significant reduction of vocabulary was noted in aphasics, especially of rare words, the frequent ones becoming still more frequent. Vocabulary reduction unequally affected the various grammatical categories; whereas the proportion of "conceptual" words (noun, adjective, verb) was markedly reduced in aphasics, that of "operational" ones (pronoun, numeral, preposition, conjunction) was less affected.