Performance of aphasic and nonaphasic children on a sentence repetition task.

Aphasic and nonaphasic subjects repeated 24 sentences that varied according to grammatical complexity of the auxiliary. The results revealed that the repetition behavior of both groups was influenced by grammatical complexity. Sentences containing two or three optional auxiliary elements were more difficult to repeat than sentences with one or no optional auxiliary element. Similar patterns of repetition errors were observed in the responses of both groups. These findings suggest that grammatical complexity as well as length influence the retention span of aphasic children.