The role of context in facilitating syntactic decoding in aphasia

This study assessed the ability of aphasic listeners to use linguistic context to facilitate the comprehension of complex syntactic structures. Fourteen aphasic subjects were presented with reversible active and reversible passive sentences in each of three conditions: isolation; a semantically neutral prior-sentence context; and a semantically supportive prior-sentence context. Following presentation of the contextual and target sentences the subjects were asked a question that assessed their appreciation of the subject/object relationship in the target sentence. A forced-choice-response paradigm was employed. The results indicated that those subjects who had the most difficulty comprehending reversible passive sentences in isolation were able to benefit from the supportive contexts. The comprehension of active sentences was not facilitated by the contexts. These results were interpreted with respect to the comprehension strategies used by aphasic listeners to integrate information from different sources.