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Numerous studies of the discourse abilities of persons with aphasia over the past three decades represent solid first efforts to address a complex domain. Some researchers (Glosser & Deser, 1992; Caplan & Evans, 1990) have commented on an apparent dissociation between lexico-syntactic impairments and relatively preserved ability to manage discourse as a whole. Is there truly a dissociation, or could it be that we aren’t looking hard enough at sentence-level structural changes and their impact on the functional organization of discourse? Certainly, world knowledge supplements the explicit linguistic content of discourse, but can the success of discourse be truly immune to a full range of lexico-syntactic deficits and permutations? The answers to these questions hold implications for our understanding of discourse as a cognitive-linguistic entity.

For future research on the relationship between sentence-level language and discourse production, two methodological caveats are paramount. First, the elicitation of discourse does not, ipso facto, entail that one is truly measuring discourse. Simple measurement of lexical and syntactic aphasic differences elicited in a discourse context may do very little to address the impact of those differences on the coherence and cohesion of the discourse itself. Second, any discourse measure should be carefully examined for the assumptions it makes about the relationship between sentence-level skills and discourse production. Discourse is not realized through the additive accumulation of sentence-level structures, but rather through the relationship between and among elements which, in concert, achieve a …