Chapter 2
Psycholinguistics
Look at the following fragment of an exchange between an examiner and a deaf aphasic patient. What type of aphasia is the patient suffering from? Argue your case. (Examiner’s signs are given in English; dots indicate hesitation; see Appendix 1 for further notational conventions).
| Examiner: | What else happened? |
| Patient: | car ... drive ... brother ... drive ... i ... s-t-a-d |
| [attempts to gesture “stand up”] | |
| Examiner: | You stood up? |
| Patient: | yes ... brother ... drive ... dunno ... |
| [attempts to gesture “wave goodbye”] | |
| Examiner: | Your brother was driving? |
| Patient: | yes ... back ... drive ... brother ... man ... mama ... stay ... brother ... drive ... |
The patient understands the examiner’s questions and attempts to answer these but the answers are not complete sentences; rather the patient produces individual content signs which are stringed together with little apparent grammatical structure (telegraphic, a grammatical speech). Also, there are many pauses that are indicative of word-finding problems. This pattern suggests that the patient suffers from Broca’s aphasia (left-hemisphere lesion).