Asyntactic comprehension and working memory in Broca's aphasia

Newhart, Melissa and Cloutman, Lauren and Davis, Cameron and Molitoris, John and Hillis, Argye (2010) Asyntactic comprehension and working memory in Broca's aphasia. [Clinical Aphasiology Paper]

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Abstract

We hypothesized that in acute stroke, some patients show structure-specific, task-independent deficits in sentence comprehension, with chance level of accuracy on passive reversible sentences, more impaired comprehension of object-cleft than subject-cleft sentences, and more impaired comprehension of reversible than irreversible sentences in both sentence-picture matching and enactment tasks, but that this pattern of "asyntactic comprehension" is associated with impaired working memory rather than dysfunctional tissue in Broca's area as previously proposed. We found that the pattern did exist, but was often independent of both impaired working memory and ischemia in Broca’s area (which were less often independent of one another).

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