An important aspect of aphasia is the observation of behavioral variability between and within individual participants. Our study addresses variability in sentence comprehension in German, by testing 21 individuals with aphasia and a control group and involving (a) several constructions (declarative sentences, relative clauses and control structures with an overt pronoun or PRO), (b) three response tasks (object manipulation, sentence-picture matching with/without self-paced listening), and (c) two test phases (to investigate test–retest performance). With this systematic, large-scale study we gained insights into variability in sentence comprehension. We found that the size of syntactic effects varied both in aphasia and in control participants. Whereas variability in control participants led to systematic changes, variability in individuals with aphasia was unsystematic across test phases or response tasks. The persistent occurrence of canonicity and interference effects across response tasks and test phases, however, shows that the performance is systematically influenced by syntactic complexity.

失语症的一个重要方面是观察个体参与者之间和内部的行为变异性。我们的研究通过测试 21 名失语症患者和一个对照组并涉及 (a) 几种结构（陈述句、关系从句和带有明显代词或 PRO 的控制结构），(b) 三个反应任务，解决了德语句子理解的可变性（对象操作，有/没有自定进度听力的句子-图片匹配），和（c）两个测试阶段（调查测试 - 再测试性能）。通过这项系统的、大规模的研究，我们深入了解了句子理解的可变性。我们发现，在失语症和对照参与者中，句法效果的大小各不相同。而控制参与者的可变性导致系统性变化，在测试阶段或响应任务中，失语症患者的变异是不系统的。然而，响应任务和测试阶段中规范性和干扰效应的持续出现表明，性能受到句法复杂性的系统影响。