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Verbal comprehension is the ability to understand the meaning of verbal stimuli. This may involve listening comprehension, reading comprehension as well as sentence comprehension .

The ability is measured with the use of verbal comprehension tests

In neurological disorders[]

Transcortical sensory aphasia[]

In transcortical sensory aphasia impaired verbal comprehension can be the result of a number of causes such as failure of speech sound discrimination, word recognition, auditory working memory, or syntactic structure building. When clinically examined, patients with TSA will exhibit poor comprehension of verbal commands.[1][2] Based on the extent of the comprehension deficiency, patients will have difficulty following simple commands, e.g. “close your eyes.” Depending on the extent of affected brain area, patients are able to follow simple commands but may not be able to comprehend more difficult, multistep commands, e.g. “point to the ceiling, then touch your left ear with your right hand."[1] Verbal commands as such, that require the patient to cross over the midline of their body are typically more taxing than commands that involve solely the right or left side. When increasing the complexity of verbal commands comprehension is often tested by varying the grammatical structure of the command to determine whether or not the patient understands different grammatical variations of the same sentence.[3] Commands involving the passive voice or possessive, e.g. "If the snake killed the mouse, which one is still alive," usually result in comprehension problems in those who can understand simple questions.



See also[]

  1. 1.0 1.1 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named blueprints
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  3. [wwww.uptodate.com Approach to the Patient with Aphasia]. UptoDate. URL accessed on 26 September 2011.