Atypical associations to abstract words in Broca's aphasia

By developing novel semantic measures, we showed that Broca's aphasic subjects' word production was characterized by a low degree of abstractness and low degree of coherence in associations to abstract cue words. The results support models where meanings of concrete words are represented in neural networks involving perceptual and motor areas, whereas the meaning of abstract words is more dependent on connections to other word forms in the left frontal region. Semantic spaces can be used in future developments of evaluative tools for both diagnosis and research purposes.