Deictic terms, lexical retrieval and utterance length in aphasia: an investigation of inter-relations

This study quantified the number of deictic forms in the conversational speech of non-brain-damaged control, right hemisphere-damaged, and fluent and non-fluent aphasic subjects. The relationship between use of deictic terms and performance on single-word level lexical tests was examined, together with the number of deictics with increasing clause length. In the latter case, evidence of trade-off between lexical-semantic complexity and sentence length was sought. Fluent aphasics were found to use significantly more deictics than other groups, and non-fluent aphasics significantly fewer. No significant correlations were observed between deictic use and performance on the lexical tests. Analysis at the level of the group revealed no inverse relationship between deictic use and number of elements in the clause. However, this pattern could be observed in individual fluent aphasics.