ABSTRACT
The fluent production of sentences in the service of communication is an ability that most normal adults think about very little. Although everyone experiences occasional difficulty finding exactly the right words to convey an intended message, and though we may misuse or stumble over a word, for the most part we turn thoughts into sentences with little apparent effort. For aphasic speakers, on the other hand, producing sentences is often a formidable task that can go awry in a number of different ways. This chapter considers what is known (and hypothesized) about the processes underlying normal sentence production, and it attempts to relate elements of production models to characteristics of aphasic deficits. We will limit discussion to the processes sometimes referred to as “grammatical encoding,” in other words, to those processes that yield a syntactically and phonologically specified representation that can drive the mechanisms responsible for achieving detailed phonetic encoding.
