AUTOMATIC ACCESS OF LEXICAL INFORMATION IN BROCAS APHASICS - AGAINST THE AUTOMATICITY HYPOTHESIS

A number of recent articles have claimed that the language comprehensi on impairments of so-called agrammatic patients can be characterized a s being due to problems with the automatic access of semantic and/or s yntactic information from the lexicon. We describe three experiments, all using tasks which probe the immediate and automatic access of lexi cal information and compare the performance of agrammatic patients wit h that of an anemic and a fluent patient. We find no evidence in suppo rt of the automaticity hypothesis as an explanatory account of the lan guage deficits of agrammatic aphasics. Further, we argue that current research does ot lend itself to a single-explanation account of agramm atic comprehension problems, and that in-depth analyses of individual patients are more likely to be fruitful in terms of understanding the nature of comprehension deficits. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.