The role of intonation cues in aphasic patients' performance of the grammaticality judgment task

Abstract

This study investigated the possibility that the reported success of agrammatic aphasic patients in performing auditory grammaticality judgments results from their use of intonational cues to sentence well-formedness. Two agrammatic aphasics, two anomic aphasics, and two nonagrammatic patients with comprehension deficits for semantically reversible sentences were asked to judge grammatical well-formedness in three conditions. Results in a “natural” listening condition replicated the finding of M. C. Linebarger, M. F. Schwartz, and E. M. Saffran (1983, Cognition, 13, 361–392) that agrammatic patients are sensitive to grammaticality despite poor ability to use syntactic cues in comprehension tasks. Two additional listening conditions employed signal-processed auditory stimuli in which the fundamental frequency was normal or was set at a constant level. Right-hemisphere-damaged and normal controls showed no performance deficit for judgments of monotone sentences. The aphasic patients' performance was slightly worse for both signal-processed conditions, but there was little apparent effect of removing sentence intonation on their ability to judge sentence grammaticality. These results indicate that the high levels of performance on grammaticality judgment tasks have not resulted from patients' detection of intonational cues in ungrammatical sentences.