Some Linguistic Structures in the Speech of a Broca's Aphasic

It is concluded that the patient with Broca’s aphasia and agrammatism does not have a consistent simplified grammar, nor does his performance represent an economy of effort, but rather it is an effort to approximate his residual knowledge of standard English.

Abstract

A Story Completion Test for eliciting predetermined syntactic constructions is described, with a detailed report on one patient with Broca's aphasia and agrammatism. The principal observations are that The best preserved syntactic unit is the verb + object, the transition from subject to verb being more difficult. There are several deviations from the theoretical order of linguistic complexity in that WH-questions are second only to the imperative in ease of production; the passive is more often correct than the indicative because the latter requires a verb inflection. Auxiliary verbs and verb inflections are the elements most rarely produced. There is a high degree of variability among successive trials of the same item, although the patient's successive attempts on each trial usually improve the grammaticality of the output. It is concluded that the patient does not have a consistent simplified grammar, nor does his performance represent an economy of effort, but rather it is an effort to approximate his residual knowledge of standard English.