Neurological distribution of processing resources underlying language comprehension

Using a cross-modal lexical priming technique we provide an on-line examination of the ability of aphasic patients to construct syntactically licensed depend-encies in real time. We show a distinct difference be-tween Wernicke's and Broca's aphasic patients with respect to this form of syntactic processing: the Wernicke's patients link the elements of dependency relations in the same manner as do neurologically intact individuals; the Broca's patients show no evidence of such linkage. These findings indicate that the cerebra