Variability in sentence comprehension in aphasia in German
Dorothea Pregla, Paula Lissón, Shravan Vasishth, Frank Burchert, Nicole Stadie
Abstract
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.