Manifestaciones de la afasia en gallego. Datos preliminares de pacientes bilingües gallego-castellano

We present data from a preliminary study of manifestations of aphasia in Galician, a language that is spoken mainly in Galicia, N.W. of Spain. 17 aphasic patients who are bilingual in Spanish (Castilian) and Galician participated in the study and they were evaluated by the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT). Wilcoxon tests were carried out on fluency in spontaneous speech, comprehension of complex commands, phonology (Verbal Auditory Discrimination and Repetition of Words), lexicon (Lexical Decision), morphology (Derivational Morphology and Morphological Opposites) and syntax (Syntactic Comprehension, Grammaticality Judgments, Sentence Construction Correctness and Sentence Construction Sense). Special attention was paid to the difficulties in understanding sentences with clitic pronouns, passives, negatives and topicalized subjects or objects. Results showed a similar performance on all the BAT subtests for the two languages. In phonology the phonemic paraphasias that were produced respected the phonotactic rules of Galician. In syntax the sentence types that were worst understood relative to standard active sentences were negative, the sentences with topicalized objects and those with clitic pronouns. These findings are discussed in relation to the main theories of agrammatism.