Abstract
The syntactical competence of aphasic subjects (Broca’s aphasics with or without agrammatism, Wernicke’s aphasics. conduction aphasics, and others) was investigated by means of a grammatically judgment task dealing with the alphabetic numeral coding system for quantities. Contrary to previous reports based on linguistic material, the Wernicke’s and conduction aphasics were impaired. Wernicke’s aphasics scored high on false recognitions by typically generalizing lst-order acceptance rules and subrules operating on adjacent numeral lexicon elements categorized into several grammatical classes. Broca’s aphasics (and agrammatics also) showed some preserved abilities to handle relatively long-range, 2nd-order dependencies, and their performances were particularly dependent on the precise role (functor, non-functor) of the only grammatical ambiguity of this notational system «cent» (hundred). Thus, these subjects still seemed to have some knowledge of the syntactical structure of alphabetic numeral strings. The results are discussed in reference to the current discussion concerning the level and the generality of the syntactic comprehension disorder manifested by agrammatic patients with linguistic material. The scope of this study is thus not limited to the restricted domain of numerals, for the analyses of the data provide some insight in the processes underlying the syntactical knowledge of aphasics.