The Status of the Syntactic Deficit Theory of Agrammatism

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the importance of Syntactic Deficit Theory of Agrammatism. It presents three different descriptions of an SDTA, all contributing toward categorization of the agrammatic pathology (Language System minus Syntactic Component) but disagreeing from one another in the characteristics they ascribe to the syntactic component. An uncontroversial assertion is that there is a subset of aphasics who speak with a lot of effort along with phonetic distortion (Broca's aphasics), of whom it can be said that the sentences they speak have minimum syntactic structure, if any. The next uncontroversial is that agrammatic aphasies are not sensitive toward syntactic structure of sentences. However, it can be said that the problem does not lie in aspects of sentence interpretation that involve lexical semantics and that there is no evidence to prove that agrammatics have difficulty understanding sentences where lexical content alone constrains meaning.