The category internal structure in Chinese-speaking people with aphasia

Based on a semantic verbal fluency task, this study investigated the category internal structure in Chinese-speaking people with aphasia. The results show that the aphasia patients had a similar category internal structure to the healthy controls. For one thing, the patients produced basic-level and subordinate concepts at a similar rate to healthy controls. For another, the top 10 correct responses made by the patients and healthy controls were almost the same. In addition, the sociodemographic factors like age, education and gender did not play a significant role in the category production for the patients, but aphasia severity, type, cognitive functions and working memory strongly affected their category production. Overall, this study shows that the patients’ conceptual system seemed to be somewhat intact since they produced correct responses at a very high rate, like healthy controls and their differences mainly lay in quantity. This suggests that aphasia patients’ main problems may lie in lexical access to their conceptual system.