The influence of literacy in paraphasias of fluent aphasic speakers

Literature suggests that illiterate subjects are unaware of a phonological structure of oral language. This fact may influence the characteristics of aphasic speech, namely the structure of paraphasias. A test battery to explore in more detail this topic was developed by us to be used in aphasics (literate and illiterate). In this talk, we wish to present the experimental design and the results of this test battery composed by two subtests: (i) a naming test with words that belong to three distinct groups: highly frequent simple words, low frequency simple words and complex low frequent words; and (ii) a word repetition test. The naming subtest was established based on morphological criteria and in linguistic corpus frequency criteria.. These criteria were held in consideration when assessing naming performance of aphasic people. The battery was applied to aphasic speakers participants: literate and illiterate and conduction aphasia patients and anomic aphasia patients (convenience sample). The existence of three aphasic groups in our sample allowed us to establish the comparison between paraphasia types (phonological, morphological and semantic errors) made by illiterate and literate aphasic participants. Moreover, we will correlate the morphological composition and word frequency in literate people, as demonstrated in our exploratory study.