The retrieval of syntax in Broca's aphasia

Eight Broca's aphasics at the Boston Veterans Administration Hospital were administered a story completion test, designed to elicit 14 different English syntactic constructions. The first scorable response to each test item was analyzed with respect to omission of obligatory elements. The patterns of error recorded a consistent order of difficulty of the constructions, as well as a variety of strategies employed by the subjects in attempting to compensate for their limitations in syntactic encoding. The results confirmed earlier observations that initial unstressed functors are particularly vulnerable. Correspondingly a typical compensatory strategy employed by Broca's aphasics is to initiate their utterances with stressed words, like vocatives, or nouns where normal subjects produce pronouns.