ABSTRACT
In clinical descriptions of aphasia it is usually assumed that certain patterns of language impairment occur multimodally, i.e., they are found not only in speaking and auditive understanding, but in reading, writing and in metalinguistic decision tasks as well (cf. e.g., Albert, Goodglass, Helm, Rubens & Alexander, 1981; Huber, Poeck & Weniger, 1982). However, in the case of receptive and metalinguistic tasks, the linguistic features of the aphasic impairment can be, as a rule, observed only rather indirectly or selectively. For example, the incorrect understanding of a key word in the reading of a sentence can be discovered through the use of multiple choice items. However, it is almost impossible to observe directly to what extent the incorrect understanding of the key word may be attributed to difficulties in processing other lexical, morphological or syntactic features of the sentence. Traditional neurolinguistic experiments allow the identification of specific aphasic errors, but not the manner in which errors arise during language processing. The registration of eye movements may be of help here.
