Auditory semantic, syntactic, and retention errors made by aphasic subjects on the Token Test

The Token Test was administered to 25 mild aphasic and 25 matched normal subjects for the purpose of determining the linguistic nature of the auditory verbal comprehension error responses. As was expected, the aphasic subjects obtained significantly poorer scores on the Token Test than did the normal subjects, with minimal overlap between the two groups. In Parts I-IV, the errors were exclusively semantic, and reflected only the amount of required verbal memory. In Part V, the syntactic structures vary, and the aphasic subjects showed a similar pattern of difficulty as did the normal subjects. Syntactic errors were more prevalent than semantic errors in Part V, suggesting that syntactic complexity was the most important factor in verbal comprehension on this part. In comparison to previous research utilizing the Token Test with normal children, the aphasic subjects in the present study generally had high error rates on the same items as did the children.