Implicit processing of grammatical rules in a classical case of agrammatism.

The speech production of an agrammatic patient is viewed as the output of a syntactic filter which allows only nouns, verbs, and adjectives to pass. In this paper, we study the behavior of this filter in the processing of grammatically ambiguous words. Our results indicate that these words are either uttered or not as a function of their syntactic role in the sentence. Thus, the patient's oral reading of a sentence is not a concatenation of isolated words, but depends on an implicit, context-sensitive analysis. These observations bring to light a new aspect of the agrammatic's syntactic competence and may contribute to the study of psycholinguistic processes in normals.