Abstract
The long-term courses of 61 aphasic patients, whose postcritical periods ranged from 16 to 243 months, were studied for the three modalities evaluated by the Standard Language Test for Aphasia (SLTA) : oral description, repetition of sentences, and oral reading of sentences.
Performance on SLTA revealed : 1) the attained performance level observed for repetition of sentences was lower than those observed for oral description and oral reading ; 2) profiles for performance in the three modalities at the optimum level achieved could be categorized into six patterns ; 3) the profile pattern for the optimum level achieved was not necessarily the same as the pattern after onset.
It was further indicated that : 1) repetition of sentences was the most difficult task for aphasic patients ; 2) the three modalities of speech have different patterns of recovery depending on age of onset and the lesions localized.
These findings have important implications for prognostic expectations of aphasia and for selection of the best modality for stimulation of speech.
