Processing Active / Passive Sentences in Turkish Agrammatic Aphasics

In this study, the comprehension of lexical processing in aphasia was evaluated. Five left brain damaged Turkish Broca's aphasic subjects performed a lexical decision task. At the very outset of the study, a Dichotic Listening Test was conducted so that the dominant hemisphere for word processing could be evaluated. In order to check the level of lexical processing, the visual lexical decision task and passive sentence comprehension task which contained twenty active and twenty passive sentences were conducted to examine whether the subjects could comprehend the selected expressions. The results showed that Turkish Broca's aphasic patients have no difficulty in understanding active sentences which has an agent as the first element in a sentence unlike passive equivalents in a theme agent order. In other words, the potential problem of comprehension is closely related to the word order of the target language in Broca's aphasic patients.