Processing of sentences in aphasia as assessed by eye-movement recordings

The eye-movements of nine aphasic and nine nonaphasic control patients were recorded while they were looking at slides, containing eight words, selected from four different linguistic categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs). The task was to construct a 4-word sentence. The aphasic patients produced fewer syntactically and semantically correct sentences. Both aphasics and controls used more nouns than adverbs in their sentences. The eye-movement patterns revealed no statistically significant differences between the two groups in terms of fixation time per word category or in terms of fixation time per visual hemispace. Implications for a linguistic theory of sentence processing are discussed.