Evidence of syntactic deficits in a fluent aphasic

The syntactic abilities of a mild Wernicke's aphasic were examined in production and comprehension tasks. The patient made few errors involving the omission or substitution of substantives or grammatical markers, especially after the first few weeks of testing. Despite his good ability to produce sentences with acceptable surface form, he continued to make role reversal errors and to produce a restricted range of syntactic forms. In comprehension, he also demonstrated an impairment in his ability to use the syntactic information in a sentence to assign role relations. These syntactic impairments could not be attributed to a short-term memory deficit as the patient showed only a slightly reduced short-term memory span, and showed evidence of having a normal phonological store. Implications for theories of aphasic deficits as well as for theories of normal language processing are discussed.