THE GRADUAL DETERIORATION OF SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS IN A PATIENT WITH PROGRESSIVE APHASIA

FM is a progressive aphasic patient whose language comprehension we st udied over a 4-year period. We developed a variety of implicit and exp licit tasks to chart progressive changes in the representation of ling uistic knowledge (in particular, syntax and semantics) and the automat ic and controlled processes which operate on that knowledge. The repre sentation of FM's semantic knowledge remained essentially intact over the years but she became increasingly impaired at combining the meanin gs of words. She also showed progressive impairments in the processes of syntactic combination. Thus, FM's disease resulted in a progressive inability to engage in those combinatorial processes necessary for th e normal comprehension of a spoken utterance. This is not a selective deficit in the traditional sense of the term, since aspects of both sy ntax and semantics are implicated: but it is selective in the sense th at other aspects of language comprehension remain intact. (C) 1997 Aca demic Press.