Comprehension and production of different sentence TYPES in Turkish speaking non fluent and fluent aphasics

Aphasia is a language disorder, which includes problems in comprehension, production or both components of language due to a Cerebro Vascular Accident (CVA) at a particular location of the left-brain. Aphasia types are classified according to the anatomic part of the lesion, verbal output of the patient or the loss of the function resulted by the damage. The aim of this study is to determine and investigate the differences in production and comprehension skills of the fluent and non-fluent patients. The HELPSS therapy program set inspired the assessment tool. We prepared a 66 brief stories with a picture for sentence production and 33 brief stories with 3 distractive pictures for comprehension. The tool was administered to 11 non-fluent, 8 fluent and 8 non-brain damaged participants between January - June 2015 at DILKOM. The results of the assesments were analyzed on SPSS 21.0 program; Mann Whitney U test was used to compare between group differences and Wilcoxon test to compare within group differences. The results of the assessments showed that non-fluent aphasic patients have a better comprehension than fluent aphasic patients in imperative intransitive, direct and indirect object and a better production in embedded sentences. Of all the sentence types, even though the order of difficulty is a little different, all the aphasic patients are good at imperative intransitives, declarative intransitives and declarative transitives in the sentence production. Due to facilitative effect of delayed repetition, non-fluent aphasic patients produced imperative transitive, declarative intranstive, passsive sentences and yes-no questions better when they heard the mentioned sentence types in the story told; fluent aphasic patients produced only yes-no questions better.