Agrammatism, paragrammatism and the management of language

Abstract Two studies are reported in which the following theory is tested: The agrammatic sentence form which is observed in the spontaneous speech of Broca's aphasics is due to the selection of elliptical syntactic structures in which the slots for many of the closed-class words that occur in complete sentences are lacking. The selection is strategic: Its purpose is to prevent the computational overload that would result if a complete sentence form were attempted. Paragrammatic output, as observed in the spontaneous speech of Wernicke's aphasics, results from a lack of such strategic adaptation - the computational overload now causes morphological errors to occur. For eight properties of normal ellipsis in German, it was predicted that they would be more characteristic of agrammatic than of paragrammatic spontaneous speech. These properties were frequent omission of function words; infrequent omission of inflections; infrequent substitution of function words or inflections; frequent use of the infinitive...

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