Coordinator

This action was coordinated by Assistant Prof. A. Economou from the Department of Psychology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

Aims

The aims were to investigate the relationship of aphasia to performance on tasks that tap into different cognitive functions, and to report on the different sources of variability in the performance of speakers with aphasia, as a function of their processing abilities and the resource demands of the tasks.

Method

Materials: A nonverbal screening protocol and a comprehensive neuropsychological protocol were designed for the purposes of the research. The latter involved probing in depth the cognitive abilities of PWA on subtests tapping into a) short-term memory span (7 tasks); b) phonological processing (1 task); c) fluid intelligence (2 tasks); and d) sentence production.

Participants: Both the nonverbal screening test and the comprehensive neuropsychological battery were administered in total to 29 PWA, an additional 8 patients with Primary Progressive Aphasia and 20 neurologically healthy controls.

Analysis

Data was analyzed with generalized linear mixed-effects models allowing modeling simultaneous random effects of person and item in addition to fixed factors.