The manifestation of aphasic symptoms in Spanish

Abstract

Few systematic descriptions of aphasia characteristics are available about the Spanish language. Three different language aspects are examined in this paper: phonology, aphasic substitutions (paraphasias), and morphosyntax. It has been observed that phonological errors in Spanish speaking aphasies more frequently involve vowels than consonants. It is proposed that this is related to the salience of vowels observed in Spanish. Phonological paraphasias are about 10 times more frequent than verbal paraphasias in conduction aphasia. In Broca's aphasia, they are only five times more frequent, whereas in Wernicke's aphasia the number of phonemic and verbal paraphasias is roughly the same. It is difficult to know how well this distribution fits in other languages, due to the absence of cross-linguistic comparisons. Agrammatism in Spanish has certain distinguishing characteristics, particularly due to the significant flexibility of the word order in the sentence and the use of some preposition to distinguish the object from the subject. Certain aspects of Spanish grammar are relatively resistant in cases of brain pathology, such as the subject-verb concordance. Some relatively unusual types of sentences, such as passive sentences, are significantly impaired in cases of agrammatism. Obviously, those grammatical aspects that are stronger (i.e., more crucial to distinguish the agent and the patient, such as the use of the preposition “a”) are also better preserved in cases of Broca's aphasia associated with agrammatism. It is concluded that, despite similarities with aphasia described in other Indo-European languages, certain aphasia features can be considered characteristic of the Spanish language.