Sentence processing in fluent and non-fluent aphasia

TL;DRAbstract

The most notable feature of Broca's aphasia is "agrammatic" speech production, with loss of fluency and constriction of vocabulary. In addition, some Broca's aphasics have been found to exhibit difficulties in sentence comprehension, though the source of their comprehension problems remains controversial. One theory of agrammatism identifies impairment of the syntactic component, predicting errors both in comprehension and production. If there is a central syntactic deficit, then Broca's aphasics patients would be expected to perform poorly on sentences in which the correct interpretation hinges on a full syntactic analysis, independent of variations in other task demands. They would also be expected to yield a different pattern of errors than Wernicke's aphasics on sentences with complex syntactic structure.^ To investigate these predictions the present study tested Serbo-Croatian speaking aphasics (seven Broca-type aphasics with agrammatic output; five Wernicke-type aphasics). The te

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