Chapter 24 - Comprehension Disorders in Aphasia: The Case of Sentences that Require Syntactic Analysis

Abstract

Almost 100 years earlier, Wernicke (1874) had made exactly the same theoretical move about single word comprehension. Confronted with a patient who made phonemic errors in speech and did not understand spoken language, he argued that the two performances arose because of a single impairment—a loss of the long-term store of the sounds of words, which he argued would produce exactly these two deficits. An analysis of two abnormal performances being because of a deficit in a single underlying function has trouble withstanding the observation that each of the abnormal performances occurs in isolation. Unfortunately for both Wernicke's theory and the theory that agrammatic speech and asyntactic comprehension have their origins in a single deficit of syntactic processing, disturbances of each function have been observed in isolation. Some agrammatic patients have normal comprehension, some patients without Broca's aphasia or agrammatism have disorders of comprehension that are indistinguishable from those seen in these syndromes. As far as is known, the same or at least similar disorders of comprehension occur in all aphasic syndromes.