A Study of the Understanding of Aphasia Speech – Metodological Proposal

Abstract

The article presents a proposal for methodology to study of understanding spoken and written statements by people who have developed aphasia as a result of focal brain damage within the speech area (usually the middle part of the left hemisphere in right-handed people). The problem of understanding in speech therapy is a category that is still not well known, so there is a need to investigate this activity on the basis of a structured research tool. The proposed methodology, referring to the experience of glottodidactics, which distinguishes four levels of understanding of the text: global, selective, detailed and interactive, allows to determine the degree of dysfunction in the understanding of the text at its different levels. The results obtained from the study of oral and written texts (in and out of context) are complemented by the assessment of understanding of individual language structures of varying levels of grammatical complexity (passive side, syntactic inversion, sentences with double negation, government relations, comparative expressions, prepositional
expressions) – both in oral and written texts.