Idiom Comprehension in Persian Aphasic Patients

Authors
S. Raghibdoust 1
M. Shekaramiz 2
S. Raghibdoust 1
1 Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran
2 Assistant Professor of linguistics, Islamic Azad University, Ahvaz, Khuzestan, Iran
Abstract

The comprehension of Persian idioms was studied in monolingual Persian aphasic patients. Having specific structures, idioms are different from other sentences in every language, so their way of processing can be different from that of other sentences too. The main goal of this study was to investigate the roles of the two brain hemispheres in idiom processing. Idiom comprehension in two left hemisphere damaged (LHD) and two right hemisphere damaged (RHD) patients was assessed through three tasks: a sentence-to-word matching task, a sentence-to-picture matching task and an oral definition task. The results of all tasks showed that idiom comprehension in brain damaged patients was impaired compared to that of the control group (which consisted of 15 healthy subjects). There were no meaningful differences between the performance of right hemisphere damaged patients and that of left hemisphere damaged patients. In addition, some probable factors such as the visual-spatial deficits in RHD patients or severe production deficits in LHD patients had some effects on the patients' performances.

Keywords

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Language Related Research
Volume 6, Issue 6
November and December 2015
Pages 185-200