Idiom Comprehension of Chinese Patients With Aphasia: A Case Study

Previous studies on idiom comprehension of patients with aphasia (PWAs) mainly focused on Indo-European speakers, examining whether PWAs could correctly extract the target meaning of idioms, while among Chinese PWAs, idiom familiarity, context and other variables affecting idiom comprehension were rarely studied. Hence, this study aims to explore whether Chinese PWAs can correctly comprehend the target meaning of idioms, and further investigate the role of familiarity and context. For three Chinese PWAs, this study adopted the string-to-word matching task, taking Chinese four-character idioms as the experimental stimuli, and provided decoy words containing target meaning, literal meaning, unrelated abstract meaning and unrelated concrete meaning as the matching words of idiom items by manipulating the familiarity and contextual presence of idiom items. The results suggested that the PWAs could not correctly extract the target meaning of idioms and presented both the literal meaning tendency and the weak abstract meaning tendency, and the influence of familiarity on the comprehension of idioms was stronger than that of context. These results support the Graded Salience Hypothesis.