Effects of word frequency and modality on sentence comprehension impairments in people with aphasia

Purpose: It is well known that people with aphasia have sentence comprehension impairments. The present study investigated whether lexical factors contribute to sentence comprehension impairments in both the auditory and written modalities using online measures of sentence processing. Method: People with aphasia and non brain-damaged controls participated in the experiment (n = 8 per group). Twentyone sentence pairs containing high- and low-frequency words were presented in self-paced listening and reading tasks. The sentences were syntactically simple and differed only in the critical words. The dependent variables were response times for critical segments of the sentence and accuracy on the comprehension questions. Results: The results showed that word frequency influences performance on measures of sentence comprehension in people with aphasia. The accuracy data on the comprehension questions suggested that people with aphasia have more difficulty understanding sentences containing low-frequency words in the written compared to auditory modality. Both group and single-case analyses of the response time data also indicated that people with aphasia experience more difficulty with reading than listening. Conclusion: Sentence comprehension in people with aphasia is influenced by word frequency and presentation modality.