Varieties of Sentence Comprehension Deficits: A Case Study

In recent publications, Grodzinsky (1984, 1986, 1990) has offered a new theory of the disruption of sentence comprehension in so-called agrammatic aphasics. In these works Grodzinsky contends that his account, which is based in various ways on the formal apparatus of current syntactic theory (Chomsky, 1981), is an accurate and explanatory characterization of the preserved language of all those who present with both agrammatic sentence production and asyntactic sentence comprehension. We argue that this claim is not in accord with the facts. We present a detailed case study of the sentence comprehension performance of a patient who is clinically categorized as agrammatic. This patient's performance on full and truncated passives, and on subject- and object-cleft sentences fails each of Grodzinsky's predictions for these sentence types. We argue that whether there exists any patient who does exhibit the predicted performance pattern is also in serious doubt.