ABSTRACT
AL was a 68-year-old gentleman who had a left CVA resulting in a severe receptive and expressive aphasia. Ten years post-onset his speech was nonfluent and characterised by word-finding difficulties and abandoned, incomplete sentences. An analysis of his narrative speech identified a deficit in the production of thematic structure at the functional level representation (Garrett, 1980). Detailed assessment showed that AL's difficulties included a verb retrieval deficit, a deficit in the creation of the predicate argument structure and thematic role and/or mapping difficulties. The aim of therapy was to improve access to predicate argument structure information, with a view to enabling AL to use more complex and a wider range of argument structures and to reduce the number of verbs used in an inappropriate argument structure.
