Abstract
The “Spatial Comprehension Test” was devised in order to examine ability of understanding spoken sentences which describe spatial relationships between two or more objects. We examined whether this new test can detect deficits of sentence processing which cannot be explained by deterioration in syntax ability and which have often been reported in left parietal damaged patients. The subjects consisted of a left parietal damaged aphasia group (5 mild fluent aphasics) , a non-left parietal damaged aphasia group (3 mild fluent aphasics and 2 mild non-fluent aphasics) , and an age-matched group of 10 normal controls. While both control groups showed good performance in the Spatial Comprehension Test, all patients in the left parietal damaged group were impaired. However, their sentence comprehension as evaluated using the Token Test, Syntax Test of Aphasia, and Particle Comprehension Test was preserved. In the left parietal damaged group, performance in the Spatial Comprehension Test and in ordinary sentence comprehension tests on the above were not correlated. These results suggested that the Spatial Comprehension Test may be able to detect impairment of sentence comprehension relating to spatial relationships, which is distinguishable from syntactical aspects of sentence processing.
