Disorders of Syntax in Aphasia

Disorders of syntax in patients with aphasia have been found in both sentence comprehension and production, in relation to how the words are combined into larger units and some specific omissions of elements needed to integrate words into sentences. These include difficulties with sentences that require the correct interpretation of verb morphology (e.g., passive clauses, and other affixes) or sentences with a different order of words that requires more processing for the information to be understood (e.g., non-canonical sentence with a OSV order). In this chapter, we will discuss some relevant outcomes of research in syntax in aphasia, what these entail for a syntactic disorder, sometimes called agrammatism, and some implications for clinical protocols based on sentence level recovery.