Task-independent and task-specific syntactic deficits in aphasic comprehension

Abstract

We present 42 case studies of aphasic syntactic comprehension performances in sentence-picture matching and object manipulation, examining the data for the existence of deficits referable to particular syntactic structures, or such structures in a single sentence form, in both tasks. No deficits affected performance on all sentence types that contained a particular structure in both tasks. Most deficits affected single sentence forms in only one task, and no isolated deficits occurred. The implications of the pattern of performance for the nature of aphasic deficits are discussed.