Reduced resources and specific impairments in normal and aphasic sentence comprehension

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Abstract
Our recent article (Miyake, Carpenter,&Just, 1994) posits that comprehension breakdown in aphasic patients arises, in part, from reduced working memory resources for language. One issue that we consider in this article concerns the nature of the deficits postulated in the theory, in contrast to two alternative views of the deficit: (1) a proposal cast in terms of a partial loss of knowledge rather than reduced resources, and (2) a proposal that there is a separate resource pool for syntactic processing, rather than a more general pool for language comprehension. A second issue that we address here concerns patterns of selective sparing and impairment among some patients that have often been interpreted as indicating specific impairments in sentence processing operations. We argue that such micro-level dissociations at a fine-grain level of analysis can arise for many reasons other than selective impairments and, more specifically, that the occurrence of analogous patterns in normal adults challenges the common interpretations of double dissociations regarding sentence comprehension deficits.