comparing the production of complex sentences in persian patients with ‎post-stroke aphasia and non-damaged people with normal speaking

background: cerebrovascular disease leading to stroke is the most common cause of aphasia. speakers with agrammatic non-fluent aphasia have difficulties in production of movement-derived sentences such as passive sentences, topicalized constituents, and wh-questions. to assess the production of complex sentences, some passive, topicalized and focused sentences were designed for patients with non-fluent persian aphasic. afterwards, patients’ performance in sentence production was tested and compared with healthy non-damaged subjects. methods: in this cross sectional study, a task was designed to assess the different types of sentences (active, passive, topicalized and focused) adapted to persian structures. seven persian patients with post-stroke non-fluent agrammatic aphasia (5 men and 2 women) and seven healthy non-damaged subjects participated in this study. the computed tomography (ct) scan or magnetic resonance imaging (mri) showed that all the patients had a single left hemisphere lesion involved middle cerebral artery (mca), broca`s area and in its white matter. in addition, based on bedside version of persian western aphasia battery (p-wab-1), all of them were diagnosed with moderate broca aphasia. then, the production task of persian complex sentences was administered. results: there was a significant difference between four types of sentences in patients with aphasia [degree of freedom (df) = 3, p < 0.001]. all the patients showed worse performance than the healthy participants in all the four types of sentence production (p < 0.050). conclusion: in general, it is concluded that topicalized and focused sentences as non-canonical complex sentences in persian are very difficult to produce for patients with agrammatic non-fluent aphasia. it seems that sentences with a-movement are simpler for the patients than sentences involving a`-movement; since they include shorter movements in compare to topicalized and focused sentences.