Syntactic effects in sentence completion by Broca's aphasics

Abstract A study of six Broca's aphasics is reported. The task was to complete sentence frames with a missing word whose type was systematically varied by syntactic form class (nouns, verbs, prepositions, and particles) and the number of lexical options appropriate to any given instance. The primary aim was to contrast syntactic type (content vs. function words) and level of sentential constraint as ways of determining whether there was a central syntactic component to the language deficit. There was a significant effect for word type and an interaction between word type and level of constraint. These results are discussed as supporting a syntactic interpretation of the deficit.