Chi parla male pensa male? La valutazione delle abilità cognitive extra-linguistiche nelle persone afasiche

This paper presents the first results of a wider research aimed at investigating the role of language in the assessment of cognitive abilities in adult aphasic subjects by collecting data on their performance in neuropsychological tests used for the assessment of cognitive abilities and considered to have low verbal content. In particular, the paper presents the results obtained from the administration to 40 aphasic subjects and 20 healthy controls of the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), a screening test developed for the diagnosis of dementia, considered to have low verbal content. The results show that aphasics perform worse than controls. Moreover, the aphasics’ performance in the MMSE is correlated with their scores in the Token test, assessing language comprehension. This leads to conclude that using MMSE to assess mental state of aphasic subjects is discriminatory.