Influence of Selected Semantic Variables on Word Associations of Aphasics

Abstract

A word association test consisting of 10 animate noun and 10 inanimate noun stimuli was administered to 30 French-speaking and 30 English-speaking college students, 14 hospitalized non-aphasics, 7 fluent aphasics, and 7 dysfluent aphasics. The purpose of the study was to compare the response types and to investigate the effects of the semantic feature of animacy on response type and response latency. It was found that dysfluent aphasics gave significantly more paradigmatic responses than the hospitalized non-aphasics, and that the aphasics responded much more slowly than the hospitalized non-aphasics. There was no difference between English and French students on the number of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses given; however, the English students responded significantly faster than the French students. Both the college students and the fluent aphasics responded significantly faster to inanimate nouns than to animate nouns. There was no response type-semantic feature interaction found for any of the groups. These findings provided evidence that aphasics do not respond similarly to normals, and that the animacy feature has an influential effect on linguistic performance.