Moving verbs in agrammatic production

Broca’s aphasics with agrammatism suffer from a severe deficit in their ability to handle verbs. Until the early eighties, the accepted account was that verb inflections are omitted in agrammatism. This was probably due to the fact that in English, patients produce bare verbs. In 1984, Grodzinsky looked at cross-linguistic data, and showed that the appropriate description of the data is substitution rather than omission of inflections: in languages in which the bare verb is well formed, the inflection is substituted by a zero morpheme; In languages in which a bare verb is not an option, substitution with a different inflection occurs. This ends up in inflection omission in languages like English, and in inflection substitution in languages like Hebrew.