DETERMINANTS OF SENTENCE COMPREHENSION IN APHASIC PATIENTS IN SENTENCE-PICTURE MATCHING TASKS

The results of two studies of sentence comprehension in aphasic patien ts using sentence-picture matching tests are presented. In the first s tudy, 52 aphasic patients were tested on 10 sentence types. Analysis o f the number of correct responses per sentence type showed effects of syntactic complexity and number of propositions. Factor analysis yield ed first factors that accounted For two-thirds of the variance in perf ormance to which all sentence types contributed. Clustering analysis y ielded groups of patients whose performances progressively deteriorate d and in which performance was more affected by sentence types that we re harder for the group overall. These results were very similar to th ose previously obtained using an enactment task. In the second study, 17 aphasic patients were tested on the some 10 sentence types using bo th sentence-picture matching and enactment tasks. Correlational analys es showed that performance on the two tests was significantly correlat ed across both subjects and sentences. The results provide data releva nt to the determinants of the complexity of a sentence in auditory com prehension.