Syntactic versus semantic performances of agrammatic Broca's aphasics on tests of constituent-element-ordering.

Ten agrammatic Broca's aphasics ordered written sentence constituents to form simple, active-declarative sentences of the structure the + N + is/are + V + ing + the + N. Four specific linguistic tasks were presented. These aphasic subjects used likely semantic relationships among major lexical items to order sentence constituents. They recognized basic sentence syntax (N + V + N) and the NP structure (art + N) but failed to arrange constituents accurately when recognition of the morphophonemic agreement between subject and verb was the basis of response.