ABSTRACT
Standard clinical descriptions of Broca's aphasia-the language disorder associated with left-anterior brain damage-have held that while there is an obvious disruption to production in the form of labored and agrammatic speech, comprehension skills remain relatively intact (e.g., Lenneberg, 1973; Locke, Caplan, & Kellar, 1973). As might be expected from my introductory remarks, however, this clinical emphasis on the dissociation of productive and receptive skills has proved somewhat misleading. Finer grained analyses of the bases of "relatively intact" comprehension have indicated that speech and comprehension are not so readily separable as clinical impression would have them be. Rather, these experimental observations suggest that not only do Broca's aphasics have comprehension limitations, but that in an interesting manner this limitation roughly parallels that so easily observed in production: Just as the patients tend, when speaking, to omit grammatical morphemes, both free and bound (i.e., the closed class of minor lexical categories-determiners, auxiliaries, and morphemes signaling tense and number, and the like), so too are they unable to make use of these items as syntactic placeholders for the purpose of comprehension (Goodglass, 1976; Scholes, 1978; Zurif, Caramazza, & Myerson, 1972; Zurif & Caramazza, 1976).
