Abstract
Over the past 20 years, there have been significant advances in the cognitive analysis of agrammatism in aphasic patients. Investigators have understood agrammatism in terms of impairments to particular modules within a models of information-processing. Studies on asyntactic comprehension yielded some evidences about impaired modules in sentence comprehension process such as parsing sentences for their syntactic functions and assigning thematic roles to the parsed constituents. It was also suggested that aphasics use syntactic, heuristic and lexico-pragmatic routes to meaning, when they comprehend sentences. The results in those studies have contributed in developing treatment programmes for syntactic deficits in aphasics.
This paper consisted of two sections : Firstly, studies on syntactic deficits in aphasics mentioned above were reviewed, and a way to develop treatment programme for syntactic deficits in aphasics was discussed based on the results of these studies. Secondly, results of the syntactic treatment for agrammatism in a Broca's patient were reported. This patient represented syntactic deficits in both sentence comprehension and production. His ability to parse syntactic functions was spared, but ability to map thematic roles to the parsed constituents was impaired. As the mapping processes were intensively stimulated, his performance in sentence comprehension and production improved systematically.
