A case study of reproduction conduction aphasia II: Sentence comprehension

Abstract

We present data regarding assignment of thematic roles to noun phrases by RL, a reproduction conduction aphasic, in semantically reversible sentences with a variety of syntactic structures. RL makes systematic errors in sentence interpretation. With auditory presentation of sentences, he has difficulty with sentences containing relative clauses in subject position. This is consistent with his having difficulty due to a high local memory load imposed by these structures. With written presentation, RL does not distinguish three sentence types which contain the sequence NP-V-NP-V-NP. His pattern of results suggests that he does not recognise that verbs are embedded or conjoined in the sentence types in question. This may reflect the absence of prosodic cues to syntactic structure in written material. In both modalities, RL has some difficulty with passive morphology, but distinguishes passive from active sentences. The pattern of results with auditory presentation suggests that memory stores and structure-building operations internal to a sentence parser-interpreter are impaired in RL. We consider the relationship between aspects of working memory and sentence parsing-interpretation on the basis of this case and other cases in the recent neuropsychological literature.