REPLICATING THERAPY FOR MAPPING DEFICITS IN AGRAMMATISM - REMAPPING THE DEFICIT

This study was designed to replicate and extend an earlier study in wh ich a therapy programme was carried out with two agrammatic aphasic pa tients with sentence processing impairments suggested to be at the lev el of mapping thematic roles and grammatical relations (Byng 1988). In the current study one of the therapy procedures implemented in the pr evious study was repeated with three different people with long-term ' agrammatism'. The outcome of the therapy resulted in some gains in sen tence production and verb retrieval, but these gains varied across the three patients. Whilst some change had taken place for each person, t he pattern of results showed that the quality and extent of the change was different in each case. The potential source for these difference s is explored and the implications of the study for the necessary deve lopment of theories about therapy are discussed.