AGRAMMATIC SENTENCE PRODUCTION - THE USE OF A TEMPORAL-SPATIAL STRATEGY

We report the sentence production of a left-handed man with a right-he misphere infarct. He demonstrated an inability to correctly map gramma tical categories (subject, object) onto thematic roles (agent, patient ) even for simple active sentences. The patient's performance appears to be the result of selective damage to the functional level (Garrett, 1980) of sentence production. His failure could not be accounted for by theories of agrammatism that implicate memory deficits, phonologic processing impairments, or deficits in processing complex transformati ons. The patient's performance revealed the consistent application of a temporal-spatial strategy in sentence production, despite adequate l exical-semantic abilities. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.