Sentence Processing in Aphasia: Dual-Task and Sentence Type Effects

Adults with aphasia or no brain damage completed a grammaticality judgment task alone and in competition with a tone discrimination task to determine whether (a) cognitive factors interact with stimulus parameters (i.e., syntactic complexity, number of propositions) known to influence sentence processing, and (b) material-specific limitations (grammaticality judgment in isolation), general cognitive abilities (cognitive test scores), or both are important predictors of dual-task outcomes. Accuracy, grammatical sensitivity, and reaction time findings were consistent with resource models of aphasia and underscore the theoretical and clinical importance of acknowledging and specifying interactions between language and cognition in normal and patient populations