On-line syntactic processing in aphasia: studies with auditory moving window presentation

Twenty-eight aphasic patients with left hemisphere strokes and matched control subjects were tested on an auditory moving windows task in which successive phrases of a sentence were presented in response to subjects' self-paced button presses and subjects made timed judgments regarding the plausibility of each sentence. Pairs of sentences were presented that differed in syntactic complexity. Patients made more errors and/or took longer in making the plausibility judgments than controls, and were more affected than controls by the syntactic complexity of a sentence in these judgments. Normal subjects showed effects of syntactic structure in self-paced listening. On-line syntactic effects differed in patients as a function of their comprehension level. High-performing patients showed the same effects as normal control subjects; low performing patients did not show the same effects of syntactic structure. On-line syntactic effects also differed in patients as a function of their clinical diagnosis. Broca's aphasic patients' on-line performances suggested that they were not processing complex syntactic structures on-line, while fluent aphasics' performances suggested that their comprehension impairment occurred after on-line processing was accomplished. The results indicate that many aphasic patients retain their ability to process syntactic structure on-line, and that different groups of patients with syntactic comprehension disorders show different patterns of on-line syntactic processing.