Lexical Ambiguity Processing in Persian-speaking Patients With Broca and Wernicke Aphasia

Wernicke and Broca are two essential types of aphasia in which patients’ productive and comprehensive abilities are affected, respectively. Although the lexico-semantic knowledge, as the heart of language comprehension, has been investigated in many research studies, there are still some controversies regarding the nature of probable lexical deficits in these patients. This study tried to delve into this issue and provide a plausible explanation in the Persian setting.

In doing so, 6 patients with Broca Aphasia (BA), 6 patients with Wernicke Aphasia (WA), and 12 healthy age- and education-matched monolingual controls were selected. Conducting a lexical decision task, each patient was required to decide whether the third word of an auditory presented triplet was meaningful or not. The first and last words of the triplet were related or unrelated to the ambiguous middle word.

The results showed the similarity of the performance of WA patients to that of healthy control. That is, the context shaped by the first word facilitated the activation of the third word. Thus, they exhibited selected access to different meanings of ambiguous words as the healthy controls did. In contrast, semantic facilitation was not observed in BA patients.

Our results supported the previous findings asserting the intactness of semantic representation in WA patients.