People with agrammatic aphasia often experience greater difficulty comprehending passive compared to active sentences. The Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH; Grodzinsky, 2000) proposes that aphasic individuals cannot generate accurate syntactic representations of passive sentences and, hence, use an agent-first processing strategy which leads to at-chance performance. We tested this claim using the eyetracking-while-listening paradigm in order to reveal online processing routines. Ten agrammatic aphasic participants and 10 age-matched controls listened to passive and active sentences and performed a sentence-picture matching task (i.e., selecting between two pictures with reversed thematic roles), while their eye movements were monitored. Control participants' performance was at ceiling, whereas accuracy for the aphasic participants was above chance for active sentences and at chance for passive sentences. Further, for the control participants, the eye movement data showed an initial agent-first processing bias, followed by fixation on the correct picture in the vicinity of the verb in both active and passive sentences. However, the aphasic participants showed no evidence of agent-first processing, counter the predictions of the TDH. In addition, in active sentences, they reliably fixated the correct picture only at sentence offset, reflecting slowed processing. During passive sentence processing, fixations were at chance throughout the sentence, but different patterns were noted for correct and incorrect trials. These results are consistent with the proposal that agrammatic sentence comprehension failure involves lexical processing and/or lexical integration deficits.

中文翻译：

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跟踪语法失语症中的被动句理解

与主动句相比，语法性失语症患者在理解被动句时通常会遇到更大的困难。Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH; Grodzinsky, 2000) 提出，失语者无法生成被动句的准确句法表示，因此，使用代理优先处理策略，从而导致偶然的表现。我们使用眼动-边听范式测试了这一说法，以揭示在线处理程序。10 名语法失语症参与者和 10 名年龄匹配的对照听被动句和主动句，并执行句子-图片匹配任务（即，在两个主题角色相反的图片之间进行选择），同时监测他们的眼球运动。对照组参与者的表现处于天花板，而失语症参与者的准确性高于主动句和被动句的机会。此外，对于控制参与者，眼动数据显示出初始代理优先处理偏差，然后在主动句和被动句中的动词附近注视正确的图片。然而，失语症参与者没有表现出代理优先处理的证据，这与 TDH 的预测相反。此外，在活动句子中，他们仅在句子偏移处可靠地固定正确的图片，反映出处理速度变慢。在被动句处理过程中，整个句子都有可能出现注视，但正确和不正确的试验记录了不同的模式。