Consequences of a phonological coding deficit on sentence processing

The sentence processing abilities of EA, a conduction aphasic with a documented phonological coding deficit, were investigated in tests of sentence comprehension, production, and repetition. EA showed a syntactic comprehension deficit, relying heavily on word order information to make grammatical role assignments. Production tests revealed a generally intact ability to generate a variety of sentence constructions, although there were frequent errors in the use of grammatical morphemes in the written productions. The repetition tasks were used to identify the processing strategies EA used under heavy memory load conditions. EA's semantic and syntactic processing capabilities and the role of the phonological code in normal sentence processing are discussed.