Abstract
Seventy aphasic patients with left unilateral hemisphere damage and 20 controls (10 right hemisphere-damaged patients and 10 normals) were given two sets of tasks : one intended to compare auditory comprehension and word finding of animal and object names with those of the corresponding onomatopoeias ;the other intended to test abilities to identify sources of environmental sounds and produce their names and onomatopoeias after listening to them.
It was found that there was a significantly high correlation between the performances of onomatopoeias and tkosc of names in word finding as well as in auditory comprehension. There was no significant difference among aphasic types in auditory comprehension, while in the word-finding tasks onomatopoeias, compared with names, Were significantly more impaired in fluent than non-fluent aphasics.
Some aphasics faijed in the sund recognition test, where the impairment was significantly correlated with the severity of the auditory comprehension defect in the entire aphasic sample.
Onomatopoeias were more difficult than names to produce in spite of the fact that their phonological representations are more directly related to their meanings. Conceivable factors include : 1) Onomatopoeias are also part of language, which is a social symbolic system, and must be processed through the phonological route in common with general names ; 2) Word frequency may have certain effect ; 3) Sound-object semantic association may be impaired in aphasics.
