How do individuals with aphasia cope with grammar?

Emma Lyne Peters

Purpose: Aphasia is the loss of language abilities following damage to the regions of the brain responsible for language. Associated with aphasia are two patterns of disordered language production: agrammatism and paragrammatism. Agrammatism, associated with nonfluent aphasia, is characterized by the omission of function words (e.g., articles, prepositions) and inflections (e.g., -ing, -ed), while paragrammatism, which is associated with fluent aphasia, is characterized by the incorrect substitution of words and inflections. Although agrammatism is well documented, there has been little investigation of paragrammatism; its diagnosis is highly subjective. The current study aimed to explore the grammatical patterns of individuals with Broca’s aphasia (and agrammatism) and Wernicke’s aphasia (and paragrammatism) to better understand these disorders.Methods: Using participants’ narrative language samples taken from AphasiaBank, we examined utterance- and word-level errors, length of utterances, and the syntactic structures of utterances. Coding for utterance- and word-level errors had been previously completed by AphasiaBank contributors. Utterances were coded for their syntactic features (e.g., subject, verb phrase, prepositional phrase) to analyze syntactic structures.Results: Individuals with Broca’s aphasia produced twice as many grammatical errors per utterance, compared to individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia. Individuals with Broca’s aphasia most often produced utterances that were between one and three words in length; individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia more frequently formed utterances that were between four and six words long. Our syntactic analysis demonstrated that individuals with Broca’s aphasia more often used quotation embedding and other pseudo-grammatical structures in their utterances, whereas individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia were better able to use syntactic elements likeobjects and prepositional phrases. However, in their longer utterances, individuals with Wernicke’s aphasia displayed their paragrammatic deficits by excessively and inappropriately embedding subordinate clauses in a way that caused syntax to be jumbled.Conclusions: We found different patterns of language for individuals with Broca’s aphasia (and agrammatism) and Wernicke’s aphasia (and paragrammatism) in terms of their proportion of grammatical errors and syntactic abilities. These findings support the idea that agrammatism and paragrammatism are separate disorders with different characteristics.

How do individuals with aphasia cope with grammar?

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