Korean Passive Sentence Comprehension Deficits and its Relation to Working Memory Capacity in Persons with Aphasia

Abstract

The current study investigated Korean passive sentence comprehension deficits in aphasia and its underlying processing mechanisms using three types of syntactic structures: 1) active sentences with a 2-argument structure, 2) active sentences with a 3-argument structure, and 3) passive counterparts of active sentences with a 2-argument structure. Persons with aphasia showed differentially greater difficulties in passive than 2-place active sentences compared to the normal elderly adults, but the group differences were not significant between the passive and 3-place active sentences. Working memory, not the short-term memory, was significantly correlated with overall aphasia severity and performance on sentence comprehension tasks