This online lecture in the C-STAR series was given by Dirk den Ouden, Ph.D., on May 11th, 2017, at the University of South Carolina.

abstract:
Like many discussions of aphasic performance and classification into syndromes, ideas about the notion of ‘agrammatism’ have seen a cyclic development, ranging from rejections of a consistent agrammatic performance pattern to strong hypotheses of a central deficit in syntactic processing. Whether or not agrammatic production and perhaps comprehension after brain damage manifest themselves consistently in a particular group of patients is also relevant to research on the neural underpinnings of syntactic processing. In this talk, I will discuss a study into the neural predictors of agrammatic performance in aphasia, based on voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) in a group of 75 stroke survivors, with and without aphasia. A prerequisite to such analyses is a discussion of the consistency (or lack thereof) of agrammatic symptoms themselves, and this will be based on the Northwestern Assessment of Verbs and Sentences (NAVS) as well as on detailed analyses of picture descriptions.