Characterising thematic role assignment in aphasic sentence production: procedures for elicited and spontaneous output.

This paper describes two assessment tools developed to assist in characterising certain anomias that may be best understood within a sentence-processing paradigm. Although sentence-processing models promise to contribute much to our understanding of a range of aphasic deficits, the lack of available tools to measure and monitor sentence behaviour has been a limiting factor both theoretically and clinically. Based on proposals that the process of thematic role assignment may be influential in some anomias, two tools were developed to profile thematic role realisation across elicited and spontaneous speech conditions. The first measure provides an opportunity to contrast word retrieval across elicited single-word and sentence contexts, whereas the second measure permits an examination of thematic role realisation in spontaneous output. The data from two case studies are presented to demonstrate application of the tools.