SYNTACTIC COMPREHENSION IN APHASIA. AN EVALUATION TEST WITH RELATIVE CLAUSES

This work aimed to test an instrument for the assessment of deficits in sentence comprehension in Spanish and to investigate if it allows distinguishing profiles of individual with aphasia (IWA). A binary sentence-picture matching task was designed and the type of syntactic structure was manipulated: sentences with subject relative clauses (RS- El gato que muerde al conejo es rosa [The cat that bites the rabbit is pink]) and with object relative clauses (RO- El gato al que muerde el conejo es rosa [The cat that the rabbit bites is pink]). The study was administered to 151 native Spanish speakers, divided into 3 age groups and 3 levels of schooling (control group), and 5 IWA. The results showed that in the control group there is an interaction between the type of structure and the level of schooling, with more errors in RO as schooling decreases. Three IWA (AG, RD and RR) differed their corresponding controls only in the ORs, one IWA (OV) differed from the corresponding controls in both structures, and there is no significant difference in performance between subject RC and the corresponding controls for both types of sentences. Data allow us to discuss the sensitivity of the test to detect specific alterations of syntactic comprehension in individuals with aphasia speakers of Spanish and discriminate patients with different types of aphasia.