title: Processing passive sentences in aphasia: deficits and strategies.
abstract: Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics' ability to process passive sentences in the absence of semantic cues was investigated in an experiment which varies syntactic complexity and word order. The results indicate that Broca and Wernicke patients use different strategies for sentence comprehension. Wernicke patients use rather general strategies for interpretation, which assign syntactic function according to sequential arrangements of words. Broca's aphasics, by contrast, base their interpretation on specific structural elements of the sentence's surface form, without, however, being able to exploit the full syntactic information of these elements. The different strategies are interpreted to reflect differential underlying deficits.
mesh_terms: D000849:Anomia / Q000523:psychology*; D001037:Aphasia / Q000523:psychology*; D001039:Aphasia, Broca / Q000523:psychology*; D001041:Aphasia, Wernicke / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011578:Psycholinguistics