On deriving the properties of agrammatic comprehension

Abstract

Several recent studies characterize agrammatic comprehension as a computational rather than a conceptual deficit. A restriction in the computational capacity of the processor may affect sentence comprehension performance unevenly due to the varying demands imposed by different sentence structures and different tasks. It is argued that structures involving longer inferential chains suffer greater degradation than structures involving shorter inferential chains. Many of the observed properties of agrammatic comprehension may be seen to follow from this principle alone.