Linda E. Nicholas

Aphasic and non-brain-damaged adults' knowledge of scripts for common situations

This study was designed to determine whether script knowledge (mental representations of event sequences for situations that have been experienced in daily life) is compromised by aphasia. Aphasic and non-brain-damaged adults participated in several tasks designed to test their knowledge of scripts for common situations. The tasks included discrimination, in which subjects separated printed phrases identifying test scripts from phrases identifying foil scripts, centrality judgment, in which subjects identified the most typical and frequently occurring events in test scripts, and sequencing, in which subjects arranged the central events from test scripts in the order in which they would be expected to occur in the scripts. Error rates for both non-brain-damaged and aphasic subjects were low in all three tasks, and aphasic subjects generally performed as well as non-brain-damaged subjects did, except that aphasic subjects were significantly poorer at sequencing central events from scripts. However, the actual differences between groups in the sequencing task were quite small. These results suggest that knowledge of scripts is not seriously compromised by aphasia, at least when the aphasia is mild to moderate.