Elsevier

Brain and Language

Volume 3, Issue 4, October 1976, Pages 572-582
Brain and Language

Dissociation of algorithmic and heuristic processes in language comprehension: Evidence from aphasia

https://doi.org/10.1016/0093-934X(76)90048-1Get rights and content

Abstract

Three groups of aphasic patients, Broca's, Conduction, and Wernicke's, and a nonaphasic patients control group were tested for comprehension of object-relative center-embedded sentences. The sentences were of three types: sentences in which semantic constraints between words allowed the subjects to assign a correct semantic reading of the sentence without decoding the syntax, sentences in which semantic constraints were relaxed and for which a correct reading was only possible with knowledge of syntactic relationships among words, and sentences which described highly improbable events. The subjects' task was to choose which of two pictures captured the meaning expressed in the sentence. Broca's and Conduction aphasics performed near perfectly on sentences where they could use semantic information. Their performance dropped to chance when they had to use syntactic information. These results support a neuropsychological dissociation of heuristic and algorithmic processes based primarily, though not exclusively, on semantic and syntactic information, respectively.

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The research reported here was supported in part by NIH Grants 11408 and 06209 to Boston University School of Medicine.

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