Building the foundations for sentence production in a non‐fluent aphasic

A therapeutic programme is described which was designed for a non‐fluent patient whose single word output had remained unchanged for six years despite long‐standing intensive speech therapy. His sentence construction problems were reconsidered in the light of current theoretical hypotheses on normal sentence processing. It is postulated that previous therapy had concentrated on the more superficial aspects of sentence processing ignoring his fundamental problem in mapping meaning relations between semantics and syntax. Therapy designed to achieve accessibility to this mapping information proved efficacious.