Effects of syntactic features on sentence–picture matching in Broca’s aphasics: A reply to Drai and Grodzinksy (2005)

We reanalyzed the data in Drai and Grodzinksy (2005), considering individual patients’ responses to different sentence types to be non-independent events. The analyses revealed effects of two of the three factors identified by Drai and Grodzinsky—constituent movement and passive mood. The result is inconsistent with the trace deletion hypothesis; we conclude that features of syntactic structure other than constituent movement are relevant to understanding performance variation in patients with Broca’s aphasia.