Extralinguistic context plays a crucial role in understanding direct and indirect speech acts.
Although understanding direct speech acts is still possible without this extralinguistic context this is certainly not the case with indirect speech acts. In commonly used standardized tests for the diagnosis of aphasia, however, this fact is totally ignored. Wilcox et al. They found a major improvement in the performance of the aphasics when contextual information was made available. We tried to replicate this effect for German aphasic subjects and simultaneously differentiate the findings of Wilcox et al.