Syntactic comprehension deficits in agrammatism

Eleven agrammatic and 16 fluent aphasic patients were given a comprehension task consisting of simple, active and passive reversible sentences. The pu rpose of the study is to reconsider the comprehension disorders in agrammat ism, and particularly of passive reversible sentences, to test to what exte nt Grodzinsky's trace deletion hypothesis (TDH) is generalizable: to other types of NP-movement, and finally to ascertain whether the pattern of impai rment observed in agrammatism differs from that of fluent :Iph;laic patient s, The study confirms that trace analysis may he selectively impaired in ag rammatism. However, this defecit is not the only mechanism underlying compr ehension disorders and cannot he said to occur in all agrammatic patients. Comprehension disorders also involve the processing of clitic object pronou ns which also underly NP-movement. Finally, the impairment found in fluent aphasic patients differs, both in type and severity, from that of agrammati c patients, thus confirming the peculiar aspects of the agrammatic comprehe nsion deficit suggested by Grodzinsky's TDH. (C) 2000 Academic Press.