Real-time comprehension processes in agrammatism: A case study

The ability of an agrammatic patient to construct structural syntactic and interpretative representations on-line was tested in two experiments and the patient was much more dependent than normal upon pragmatic information.

Abstract

The ability of an agrammatic patient to construct structural syntactic and interpretative representations on-line was tested in two experiments. The first focused on global representations spanning an entire utterance, while the second examined lexical syntactic and semantic constraints on verb-argument relations. An off-line version of the second experiment was also carried out. There were two major findings. First, the patient could construct a semantic, but not syntactic, representation of an utterance. Second, he was much more dependent than normal upon pragmatic information. These results are discussed with respect to current claims about the nature of agrammatic comprehension deficits.