A Study of Comprehension of Simple and Compound Nouns in Persian-Speaking Aphasic Patients

This research has studied the language disorders of Persian-speaking aphasic patients to evaluate their comprehension abilities of simple and compound nouns، and to specify the categories having the largest number of vulnerabilities. The subjects were 3 monolingual patients (2 Broca’s and 1 transcortical motor aphasics) referring to speech therapy clinics of Shafa Hospital and Welfare Rehabilitation Center in Kerman city. Three normal control individuals matched in terms of gender، age، education، place of residence، native language and handedness also participated in the study. Research instruments were spoken word picture matching and associative word picture matching tests. The stimuli were 32 simple and 32 root and synthetic compound nouns. The results indicated that Broca and Motor Transcortical aphasic patients did not show a significant difference in comprehension of root and synthetic compound nouns (p= 0/179)، while there was a statistically significant difference between the comprehension of simple and compound nouns (p<0/05). Both types of aphasics showed more disturbance in comprehending root compound nouns comprising of “noun+noun” in comparison to other categories. The comprehension processing took place through a continuum form. The Motor Transcortical patient had more severe and wider disorders in accessing semantic information relating to compound nouns، while Broca ones had difficulty in understanding concepts.