comprehension of complex sentences in the persian-speaking patients with aphasia

Introduction: to study sentence comprehension in persianspeaking patients with aphasia considering the factors of complexity.methods: in this crosssectional study, the performance of 6 nonfluent aphasic patients were tested and their performance was compared to 15 matched control group. comprehension of semantically reversible sentences was assessed using a binary sentencepicture matching task. the stimuli were as follows: clefts; subject clefts and object clefts, also relative clauses; subject relatives and object relatives. all of them were types of movementderived structures and also simple declarative sentences as the control task.results: the best performance of aphasic patients were seen in the comprehension of subject clefts, although prior to this result we assumed that simple declarative sentences (in which there is no structural factor of complexity) can be understood easily. they showed the highest difficulty in the comprehension of object relatives. furthermore, the performance of patients in the comprehension of relative clauses was significantly weaker than understanding the clefts.conclusion: the outcomes of this study suggest that the sentence comprehension deficits of aphasic patients, in contrast to the specific deficit models, may not be related to linguistic disabilities. moreover, the problems in the comprehension of noncanonical sentences may be related to failure in the allocation of attention. finally, our results support the claims that neural characterization of the cognitive resources (e.g. working memory) is disrupted in sentence comprehension deficits.