Agrammatism, paragrammatism and the management of language

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Abstract
Two studies are reported in which the following theory is tested: The agrammatic sentence form which is observed in the spontaneous speech of Broca's aphasics is due to the selection of elliptical syntactic structures in which the slots for many of the closed-class words that occur in complete sentences are lacking. The selection is strategic: Its purpose is to prevent the computational overload that would result if a complete sentence form were attempted. Paragrammatic output, as observed in the spontaneous speech of Wernicke's aphasics, results from a lack of such strategic adaptation - the computational overload now causes morphological errors to occur. For eight properties of normal ellipsis in German, it was predicted that they would be more characteristic of agrammatic than of paragrammatic spontaneous speech. These properties were frequent omission of function words; infrequent omission of inflections; infrequent substitution of function words or inflections; frequent use of the infinitive; frequent omission of the main verb; frequent omission of the grammatical subject; frequent sentence-final position of the verb; frequent use of the strong adjective inflection. A second prediction was that in a sentence elicitation task, where the freedom to avoid the production of grammatical morphemes was limited, the output of the Broca's aphasics would become less agrammatic, i.e. less elliptical in the sense of the features given above. Three groups of aphasics were studied: a group of German-speaking Broca's aphasics, a group of German-speaking Wernicke's aphasics and, for comparison, a group of Dutch-speaking Broca's aphasics. In support of the theory, it was found that except for the omission of bound morphology, the spontaneous speech of the Broca's aphasics was more “elliptical” than that of the Wernicke's aphasics. Furthermore, on these same features, their output became less elliptical in the sentence elicitation task and more similar to the output of the Wernicke's aphasics.