ABSTRACT
Studies in the 1970s demonstrated impaired sentence comprehension in patients with good single word comprehension (e.g., Caramazza & Zurif, 1976; von Stockert & Bader, 1976). These findings generated a good deal of excitement among researchers in and outside the field of aphasia because they seemed to provide strong evidence for an independent syntactic processing module (e.g., see Caramazza & Berndt, 1978; Jackendoff, 1993, chapter 11). That is, the results appeared to provide support for linguistic theories that hypothesized a system of rules for specifying grammatical well-formedness that was independent of semantics. Despite this initial enthusiasm, a survey of current theorizing on sentence processing published in mainstream cognitive journals (e.g., Boland & Cutler, 1996; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994) indicates little or no reliance on findings from aphasia in supporting or refuting current models. This lack of connection between neuropsychological findings and theories of normal processing differentiates the domain of sentence comprehension from other areas of language processing such as single word reading, spoken word production, and short-term memory. In these domains, there is a much more lively interaction between researchers who study normal populations and those who study impaired populations (e.g., Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Heller, 1993; Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, & Gagnon, 1997; Martin, Lesch, & Bartha, 1999; Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996).
