This dissertation explores how listeners extract meaning from personal and reflexive pronouns in spoken language. To be understood, words like her and herself must be linked to a prior element in the speech stream (or antecedent). This process draws on syntactic knowledge and verbal working memory processes. I present two original research studies…

Background: Aphasia is characterized by difficulties in connected speech/writing. Aims: To explore the differences between the oral and written description of a picture in individuals with chronic aphasia (IWA) and healthy controls. Descriptions were controlled for productivity, efficiency, grammatical organization, substitution behaviour and…

The aim of the present study was to explore how a personal narrative told by a group of eight persons with aphasia differed between written and spoken language, and to compare this with findings from 10 participants in a reference group. The stories were analysed through holistic assessments made by 60 participants without experience of aphasia…

We report on three experiments that provide a real-time processing perspective on the poor comprehension of Broca's aphasic patients for non-canonically structured sentences. In the first experiment we presented sentences (via a Cross Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) paradigm) to Broca's patients at a normal rate of speech. Unlike the pattern found…

This study examined the role of empathy in the choice of syntactic form and the degree of independence of pragmatic and syntactic abilities in a range of aphasic patients. Study 1 involved 9 English-speaking and 9 Japanese-speaking aphasic subjects with 10 English-speaking and 4 Japanese normal controls. Study 2 involved 14 English- and 6…

A discussion of grammatical disorders in aphasia considers an area of ambiguity. In the work of one researcher, impairment of logico-grammatical relations is associated with semantic aphasia, not efferent-motor aphasia. In Western studies, efferent-motor aphasia is associated with impaired comprehension and production of grammar. In order to…