Evaluación de la negación en personas con afasia

Abstract

This study describes the design of a cross-linguistic battery for assessing negation in People with Aphasia (PWA). The battery is available in Spanish, English, Arabic, and Hebrew, and comprises four tests that evaluate different processing aspects: Sentence-Picture Matching (SPM), Anagram Task (AT), Sentence Repetition (REP), and Say the Opposite (SAY OP). The sensitivity of the battery was tested using two Spanish-speaking people with non-fluent aphasia. The results revealed a significant difficulty gradient in both P1 and P2 (SPM > AT > REP > SAY OP, ordered from best to worst performance), with oral production tasks being the most demanding. Furthermore, a polarity effect was found in P2, with consistently worse performance on negative sentences than on affirmative ones. Error analysis also confirmed this participant’s particular difficulties with negation processing. These findings highlight the need for batteries with various tasks that assess different aspects of language processing in PWA to characterize differential profiles in aphasia.