Sentence Comprehension in Aphasia: Stability of Performance

This study investigated the stability of 42 aphasic patients’ performance in measures of sentence comprehension. Accuracy data from 11 sentences types in each of 5 tasks were analyzed. Split-half reliability was generally high, and correlations for identical sentence types across tasks were slightly higher than those for different sentences across tasks. Analysis of individual patient data revealed only one patient with the same syntactic deficit on two tasks, and it may have been a speed/accuracy trade-off. These data suggest that performance on all sentence types combined is stable across tasks, but that task effects do influence performance.