Exploring the processing continuum of single-word comprehension in aphasia.

This study investigated the vulnerability of lexical processing in individuals with aphasia. Though classical teaching of aphasia syndromes holds that people with Broca's aphasia have intact comprehension at the single-word level, the nature and extent of this purported sparing were explored under suboptimal processing conditions. A combination of acoustic distortions (low-pass filtering and time compression) was used to probe for "break points" in lexical comprehension in a group of individuals with aphasia. Results suggest that accurate and efficient lexical processing is vulnerable to suboptimal listening climates, and that processing under these conditions reveals the continuous nature of the impairment of linguistic behaviors observed in individuals with aphasia.