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An important property of aphasia is the variability in the performance between and within individual patients. However, there have been only a few systematic large-scale studies in a range of syntactic constructions and tasks that make it possible to investigate variability and to evaluate the quantitative predictions of competing models of sentence comprehension in aphasia (Lissón et al., under review). This is the first comprehensive investigation of variability in sentence comprehension in German, testing 18 individuals with aphasia and a control group and involving (a) several construction (canonical / non-canonical declarative sentences, subject / object relative clauses, subject / object control structures, near / distant antecedents of pronouns), (b) three tasks (object manipulation, sentence-picture matching with / without self-paced listening), and (c) two test phases (to investigate test-retest reliability). This data-set provides a detailed investigation of individual-level variation in individuals with aphasia and control participants along several dimensions of sentence processing difficulty.

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The presence or absence of generalization after treatment can provide important insights into the functional relationship between cognitive processes. The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between the cognitive processes that underlie sentence comprehension and production in aphasia. Using data from seven participants who took part in a case-series intervention study that focused on noncanonical sentence production [Stadie et al. (2008). Unambiguous generalization effects after treatment of noncanonical sentence production in German agrammatism. Brain and Language, 104, 211-229], we identified patterns of impairments and generalization effects for the two modalities. Results showed (a) dissociations between sentence structures and modalities before treatment, (b) an absence of cross-modal generalization from production to comprehension after treatment, and (c), a co-occurrence of spared comprehension before treatment and generalization across sentence structures within production after treatment. These findings are in line with the assumption of modality-specific, but interacting, cognitive processes in sentence comprehension and production. More specifically, this interaction is assumed to be unidirectional, allowing treatment-induced improvements in production to be supported by preserved comprehension.

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