Analysis of abstract and concrete word processing in persons with aphasia and age-matched neurologically healthy adults using fMRI.

The concreteness effect occurs in both normal and language-disordered populations. Research suggests that abstract and concrete concepts elicit differing neural activation patterns in healthy young adults, but this is undocumented in persons with aphasia (PWA). Three PWA and three age-matched controls were scanned using fMRI while processing abstract and concrete words. Consistent with current theories of abstract and concrete word processing, abstract words elicited activation in verbal areas, whereas concrete words additionally activated multimodal association areas. PWA show greater differences in neural activation than age-matched controls between abstract and concrete words, possibly due to an exaggerated concreteness effect.