The goal of this project is to investigate the effects of lexical and syntactic factors in sentence production in aphasia. Lexical factors will be divided into those associated with nouns (noun-related semantics), and those associated with verbs (verb argument structure). Syntactic effects to be explored are those associated with word orders that place the agent/actor of a verb before or after the verb (constituent order). The role that these factors play in determining sentence production will be examined for normal subjects and aphasic patients, using a series of different tasks designed to provide converging evidence regarding aphasic patients' performances. These factors will be used as independent variables in experiments in which the ability to produce lexical items, grammatical elements, syntactic structures, and thematic roles will be the dependent measures. The research is designed to provide basic data regarding sentence production in aphasia that is not presently available. These data will related to models of normal sentence production. They may ultimately be useful in guiding therapy directed at improving aphasic patients' sentence production abilities.
