The quantitative analysis of agrammatic production: Procedure and data

Despite the long-standing interest in structural aspects of aphasic production, no method has emerged for the systematic analysis of aphasic speech. This paper attempts to address that need by outlining a procedure for the quantitative assessment of narrative speech which yields measures for both morphological and structural characteristics of aphasic production. In addition to complete instructions for carrying out this analysis, data for three groups of subjects are presented: agrammatic aphasics, aphasics who are similarly nonfluent but not clinically judged as agrammatic, and normal controls. While the agrammatics were distinguishable from the nonagrammatic patients on most measures, both nonfluent groups showed comparable reductions in the structural complexity of their propositional utterances. Other findings include indications from individual patient data that aspects of grammatical morphology may dissociate in agrammatism.

[1]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  A Multicomponent Deficit View of Agrammatic Broca's Aphasia , 1985 .

[2]  R. Brown.  A First Language , 1973 .

[3]  Kathryn Bock,et al.  Toward a Cognitive Psychology of Syntax: Information Processing Contributions to Sentence Formulation , 1982 .

[4]  H Goodglass,et al.  Narrative strategies of aphasic and normal-speaking subjects. , 1980, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[5]  Brian Butterworth,et al.  Gestures and Lexical Processes in Jargonaphasia , 1981 .

[6]  L. S. Tsvetkova,et al.  A NEUROLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF EXPRESSIVE AGRAMMATISM IN DIFFERENT FORMS OF APHASIA , 1975 .

[7]  David Crystal,et al.  Profiling Linguistic Disability , 1982 .

[8]  R. Quirk.  A Grammar of contemporary English , 1974 .

[9]  M. Behrmann,et al.  Towards a classification scheme for aphasic syntax. , 1986, The British journal of disorders of communication.

[10]  C. Snow,et al.  Spontaneous speech of aphasic patients: A psycholinguistic analysis , 1975, Brain and Language.

[11]  D. Crystal.  Working with LARSP , 1979 .

[12]  David Crystal.  Linguistic encounters with language handicap , 1984 .

[13]  Randi C. Martin,et al.  Evidence of syntactic deficits in a fluent aphasic , 1986, Brain and Language.

[14]  Alfonso Caramazza,et al.  On considerations of method and theory governing the use of clinical categories in neurolinguistics and cognitive neuropsychology: The case against agrammatism , 1985, Cognition.

[15]  Harold Goodglass,et al.  1 – Is Agrammatism a Unitary Phenomenon?* , 1985 .

[16]  K. Kleist.  Über Leitungsaphasie und grammatische Störungen. pp. 118–137 , 1916 .

[17]  E. Kaplan,et al.  The assessment of aphasia and related disorders , 1972 .

[18]  E. Saffran,et al.  Neuropsychological approaches to the study of language. , 1982, British journal of psychology.

[19]  Paul Fletcher,et al.  The grammatical analysis of language disability , 1976 .

[20]  Harold Goodglass,et al.  Contrasting cases of Italian agrammatic aphasia without comprehension disorder , 1983, Brain and Language.

[21]  K. Yorkston,et al.  A System for Quantifying Verbal Output of High-Level Aphasic Patients , 1977 .

[22]  Herman H.J. Kolk,et al.  On Parallelism between Production and Comprehension in Agrammatism , 1985 .

[23]  R. Berndt,et al.  Semantic and syntactic processes in aphasia: a review of the literature. , 1978, Psychological bulletin.

[24]  Steven G Lapointe,et al.  A theory of verb form use in the speech of agrammatic aphasics , 1985, Brain and Language.