Agrammatism in sentence production without comprehension deficits: Reduced availability of syntactic structures and/or of grammatical morphemes? A case study

A French-speaking patient with Broca's aphasia--following a left-hemisphere lesion involving the sylvian region but sparing Broca's area--is presented. Like G. Miceli, A. Mazzuchi, L. Menn, and H. Goodglass's (1983, Brain and Language, 19, 65-97) case 2, this patient produces agrammatic speech in the absence of any comprehension deficit. Unlike Miceli's patient, though, agrammatic speech can be observed in all sentence production tasks (from spontaneous speech to repetition, oral reading, and writing) whereas production of individual words--be they open class or closed class--is almost always intact. On the basis of extensive (psycho)linguistic testing, it is argued that this patient's deficit is not central and not crucially syntactic (at least) at the level of knowledge but seems to disrupt specifically those (automatic?) processes responsible for both retrieval and production of free-standing grammatical morphemes whenever they have to be inserted into phrases and sentences.