The Category Specificity in Korean Broca’s Aphasic Patients: The Impairment of Verb Comprehension

Yoon, Jungmi; Kim, Young Tae

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2002;7(3): 39-54.

Jungmi Yoon^` , and Young Tae Kim^`

윤정미(Jungmi Yoon)| 김영태(Young Tae Kim)

ABSTRACT

Many of recent neuropsychological literatures have dealt with specific semantic word categories in aphasia. Moreover, a considerable number of the research works have demonstrated that words can be selectively impaired after a brain damage. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not Korean Broca’s aphasic patients are selectively impaired in verb comprehension. Twenty Broca’s aphasic patients(14 male, 6 female) participated in the present study. A test was devised to assess participants’ comprehension of single verbs. The participants were asked to point to the picture depicting the spoken stimulus word. Three distractors were incorporated for each of the target words: semantically related distractor, phonologically related distractor, and the distractor which was unrelated to the target word. The verbs used in the comprehension task were categorized into two groups: action and non-action. All test verbs were selected from the list of words with high frequencies of occurrence in Korean. Action and non-action verbs were also matched in terms of frequencies of occurrence. The non-action verbs were classified into 3 subcategories, cognitive, perceptive, and emotional. The main findings of the research were as follows: (1) Some participants had more comprehension impairment in action verbs than non-action verbs and vice versa. (2) There was no significant difference between participants’ comprehension abilities of cognitive and emotional verbs in the subcategory of non-action verbs. (3) The most frequent error type was the semantic errors which was followed by the phonological errors and the errors of unrelated words in that order.