Agrammatism in Aphasics and Normals 1 running head: AGRAMMATISM IN APHASICS AND NORMALS Language Deficits, Localization, and Grammar: Evidence for a Distributive Model of Language Breakdown in Aphasics and Normals

Selective deficits in aphasics' grammatical production and comprehension are often cited as evidence that syntactic processing is modular and localizable in discrete areas of the brain (e.g., Grodzinsky, 2000). In this paper, we review a large body of experimental evidence suggesting that morphosyntactic deficits can be observed in a number of aphasic and neurologically intact populations. We present new data showing that receptive agrammatism is found not only over a range of aphasic groups, but is also observed in neurologically intact normals processing under stressful conditions. We suggest that these data are most compatible with a domain-general account of language, one that emphasizes the interaction of linguistic distributions with the properties of an associative processor working under normal or suboptimal conditions.