Abstract
This study reports a new approach to thematic mapping impairment. A therapeutic program is described which was designed for a non-fluent aphasic who has difficulty in interpreting semantically reversible sentences. The materials consisted of four sentence patterns for one picture: active and passive voice with standard and reversed word order. The task required auditory sentence-picture matching with repetition. He made much more errors in reversed word order sentences, which cannot be comprehended through agent-first strategy. Since the problem lies in the impairment of decoding postposed particles, truncated form which means two-word sentences {NP(noun+particle)+V(verb)} were used in order to focus his attention to one particle at a time. Through composing a full sentence from two truncated sentences and splitting a full sentence off into two truncated sentences, he succeeded in improving syntactic comprehension of reversible sentences. The results indicated that he learned to assign the appropriate thematic roles of nouns to their grammatical roles. The improvement in auditory comprehension of sentences was generalized to the comprehension of those containing untrained main verbs and also to the comprehension of written sentences. Thus therapy designed to achieve accessibility to mapping information proved efficacious.
