Study of Syntactic Comprehension in Aphasics

A battery of tests measuring syntactic comprehension was administered to 50 Ss, of whom 12 had right hemisphere lesions, 30 had left hemisphere lesions (7 non-aphasics, 7 sensory aphasics with fluent paraphasias & significant oral & written comprehension deficiencies, 5 motor aphasics with dysarthrias but without comprehension deficiencies, 11 mixed aphasics with simultaneous articulatory & comprehension deficiencies), & 6 control Ss had no cortical pathologies. The sentence reconstruction tests demonstrated that syntactic comprehension deficiencies were associated only with aphasia. However, no positive correlation to the classic types of aphasia was found. Rather, the results of the analysis of errors demonstrated that 2 groups with distinct linguistic deficiencies could be distinguished. These 2 groups were then further tested with other verbal & non-verbal tests. Analysis of correlations of deficiencies distinguished a group whose problem was basically syntactic (a result of a problem with repetition) while the other group's problem was essentially semantic (due to a problem in the naming of objects). HA Tr. & Modified by D. Leffler