ABSTRACT
German aphasiology at the end of the 19th century was mainly centred around the word and disorders related to the word level. Inspired by new developments in psychology and linguistics, especially by the early work of Karl Bühler, the German neurologist Arnold Pick (1851–1924) stressed the importance of the sentence level for the study of normal and impaired language processing and emphasised the possibility of a selective deficit of syntax. His programmatic work on agrammatism (Pick 1913) shifted the focus of interest in aphasiology from the single word to the sentence.
