Sensitivity to functors in Japanese aphasics.

Forty-two aphasic patients (11 amnesic, 11 Wernicke's, and 20 Broca's) and 10 controls were tested for sensitivity to functors in affirmative declarative sentences with sentence- verification tasks. The stimuli were constructed according to the following factors: Reversibility of Subject and Object, Voice, Word Order and Truth. The task required the subject to decide if a sentence presented auditorily was true or false with respect to a picture. The results indicated that functors differed among themselves in their understandability depending on sentence types in which they were embedded, and that there were no qualitative differences in sensitivity to functors among different clinical types of aphasia.