Functional Categories in Agrammatic Speech.

The speech of individuals with agrammatism is generally characterized by omission or substitution of grammatical morphemes, a high noun-to-verb ratio and a lack of complex sentence structures. It is generally agreed upon that agrammatic speakers show a highly selective pattern of impairment of functional categories (Arabatzi & Edwards 2000, 2002; Bastiaanse 1995; Bastiaanse & Thompson 2003; Friedman & Grodzinsky 1997; Hagiwara 1995; Lee 2003; Miceli & Caramazza 1988; Thompson, Fix, & Gitelman 2002). For example, Miceli and Caramazza (1988) observed a dissociation between derivational and inflectional morpheme production in the speech of an Italian agrammatic patient, suggesting that different processes are involved in affixation of derivational and inflectional morphology. Bastiaanse (1995) also reported a case study in which a patient with Broca’s aphasia shifted her speech spontaneously between two different patterns. In one pattern, the patient showed non-telegraphic speech with mild syntactic errors, while in the other the patient’s speech was telegraphic with severe morphological and syntactic errors such as omission of verbs, tense, aspect and agreement markers. Bastiaanse suggested that the underlying deficits can involve both phrase structure and morphosyntactic processes, or solely the former.