Quantitative Aspects of Agrammatism in Aphasia

Summary Speech transcripts from 8 non-fluent aphasics and 5 normal controls were analyzed for the presence or absence of 14 grammatical morphemes in their obligatory contexts. A stable difficulty ordering was found for the aphasics which differed from the invariant order of acquisition of these morphemes established for children. Transformational and semantic complexity, redundancy, stress and frequency were assessed as explanatory factors. Aphasics were also clearly different from normals in terms of the frequency of contexts for the morphemes that could be identified in their speech.