Agrammatic sentence production: the use of a temporal--spatial strategy

We report the sentence production of a left-handed man with a right-hemisphere infarct. He demonstrated an inability to correctly map grammatical categories (subject, object) onto thematic roles (agent, patient) even for simple active sentences. The patient's performance appears to be the result of selective damage to the functional level (Garrett, 1980) of sentence production. His failure could not be accounted for by theories of agrammatism that implicate memory deficits, phonologic processing impairments, or deficits in processing complex transformations. The patient's performance revealed the consistent application of a temporal-spatial strategy in sentence production, despite adequate lexical-semantic abilities.