To investigate the underlying mechanisms of language comprehension difficulties in aphasic patients, auditory identification tests of temporal duration and visual identification tests of stroke length for verbal and nonverbal stimuli were administered to a group of aphasic subjects and groups of young and aged normals. The results obtained can be summarized as follows: 1) In young normals, day to day changes in the accuracy of identification for the four test stimuli were almost parallel, indicating that the mechanisms involved in the identification of the four types of stimuli are similar or almost identical. 2) The aphasics showed an impaired performance only for verbal stimuli in the auditory modality. 3) An analysis of the probability of occurrence of the response errors indicated that the aphasics as a group may have had an impairment in their attention mechanism in the auditory modality, which is more dominant than their impairment in their responding mechanism.