Agrammatism
Agrammatism is a language disorder characterized by difficulty in producing and understanding grammatically correct sentences. It is often associated with damage to the brain's language centers, such as Broca's area. People with agrammatism may have trouble with verb tenses, word order, and other grammatical aspects of language.
7 Key excerpts on "Agrammatism"
eBook - ePubTalking Heads
The Neuroscience of Language
- Gianfranco Denes(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...However, such a sweeping notion is not in agreement with the literature both within and between languages that has gradually been accumulated. For example, Miceli, Silveri, Villa, and Caramazza (1984) highlighted that their Italian agrammatic patients committed many morphosyntactic errors but never created syntactically ‘impossible’ structures – for example, bare verbal roots lacking an inflected morpheme (even in the presence of an infinitival morpheme), such as lav- for lavare (‘wash’) and bambin- for bambina (‘child’). They therefore hypothesized that the ‘deep’ knowledge of syntactic rules was not damaged and that the definition of Agrammatism as a total loss of syntactic ability offered a limited vision of the phenomenon. Over the years the scientific community began, therefore, to recognize that the study of agrammatic deficits required more detailed investigation. There was an evident need to define which components of grammar were compromised or spared and, above all, to investigate the similarities between agrammatic speech production and comprehension. The analysis of agrammatic speech production has been undertaken in various languages. 6 Common characteristics of Agrammatism are a reduction in mean length of utterance (MLU), slow and effortful speech, and compromised supra-segmental prosodic features. Agrammatism is also characterized by the prevalent use of open class words (nouns, adjectives, verbs) compared with closed class words (articles, pronouns, conjunctions), the omission or substitution of free or bound morphemes, and the frequent use of uninflected verbs (i.e. verbs in their infinitive form), which is particularly visible in languages featuring a rich inflectional morphology, like Italian...
- Max Coltheart, Giuseppe Sartori, Remo Job, Max Coltheart, Giuseppe Sartori, Remo Job(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...10 Symptom Co-Occurrence and Dissociation in the Interpretation of Agrammatism Rita Sloan Berndt Department of Neurology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, 22 S. Greene Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21201, USA INTRODUCTION Much of the aphasia research that has been carried out from the perspective of cognitive neuropsychology has been focussed on the syndrome of agrammatic Broca’s aphasia. Interest in patients exhibiting agrammatic sentence production has been generated by an apparent relationship between the primary agrammatic deficit—systematic omission of the grammatical morphemes of sentences—and a theoretically-defined processing mechanism that interprets and assigns sentence structures on the basis of these grammatical elements. Although the omission of grammatical morphemes has been taken to be the cardinal feature of Agrammatism, there are other deficits of sentence production that have been viewed as part of the general clinical picture of Agrammatism (Goodglass, 1968). As a rule, patients who are called agrammatic produce grossly simplified sentence structure and rarely produce even minimally complex sentences. The grammatical marker omissions and structural simplification of Agrammatism occur within a context of effortful, dysprosodic, misarticulated speech and short utterance length. Together with a clinical description of relatively preserved auditory comprehension, these productive symptoms constitute the classical syndrome of Broca’s aphasia (Goodglass & Kaplan, 1972; see also Schwartz, Chapter 8 of this volume). All of the various hypotheses that have been offered to account for the aphasic symptom of grammatical marker omission in speech have rested upon a strong assumption that various of these symptoms must co-occur. For example, one widely-accepted view held that grammatical markers were dropped to accommodate the increased effort accompanying the co-occurring articulation disorder (Lennenberg, 1973)...
eBook - ePubSpeech and Voice
Their Evolution, Pathology and Therapy
- Leopold Stein(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It can therefore be used both in cases which have lost grammar and in those which have not yet acquired it (children). It is obvious that we are facing here the borderland between purely expressive speech and communicative language. Consequently also the feature or character of the disorder must to a certain extent depend on the character of the patient’s mother-tongue, as far as the special inflexions and syntax of a given language are concerned. The paragrammatic patient thus does not use the constructions used by the members of his group, no matter whether he had formerly possessed them or not. ParAgrammatism in children. —In some children the development of syntactical constructions has been inhibited. Their ParAgrammatism corresponds fairly exactly to that in adults. Here also syntactical and grammatical deviations are found together with those of articulation. Words are arranged simply by juxtaposition. They are placed side by side without the use of separate relational words. The majority of cases of ParAgrammatism in children as well as of severe developmental Dyslalia are characterised by developmental arrest of the archicapillaries. 1 This indicates their being on a lower evolutionary level. Aetiology. —In the history of these cases we find lesions of the brain acquired in early childhood, mental defectiveness, 2 and checked maturation, for example through Mongolism. Dissolution.—It does not assist our understanding—and this is the most important factor for pragmatic purposes such as treatment—to state that the grammar of a given language differs from that of the investigator...
eBook - ePubAn Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
Processes and Disorders
- David Groome(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Notably, patients with agrammatic speech also always have a motor speech problem – an apraxia or dysarthria of speech, for example, or (more rarely) foreign accent syndrome, where people’s accents sound very different to their fellow countrymen (due to the way we listen to and label accents, rather than the acquisition of a new accent). This suggests that syntactic processing and representations in speech production are closely linked to speech motor acts. Importantly, Varley and colleagues (Varley & Siegal, 2000; Varley et al., 2005) have demonstrated that densely agrammatic patients can still perform other kinds of tasks accurately, including logical, mathematical, and social cognitions (theory of mind tasks), suggesting that the disorder of syntax does not necessarily affect other kinds of complex cognitive processes. Semantic deficits As we can see from the descriptions of aphasia, there are a variety of different ways that semantic processing can be compromised by an acquired brain injury. However, only anomic aphasia resembles a ‘pure’ form of semantic deficit. To find a (sadly) not uncommon form of semantic deficit, one needs to turn to a kind of dementia, fronto-temporal dementia. Unlike more global dementias like Alzheimer’s disease, a focal dementing disorder can cause highly selective patterns of damage to the brain initially (see also Chapter 7). A variant of fronto-temporal dementia, semantic dementia starts with an initially very pure form of semantic deficit and a specific loss of grey matter in (initially) quite restricted cortical fields. In semantic dementia, the first symptom that patients report is a difficulty understanding what words mean. At the brain level, the damage is seen in the left anterior and ventral temporal lobe. At the start of the disease, patients can understand what objects are, and use them appropriately, and their phonetic and syntactic performance is unimpaired (they don’t make speech production errors)...
eBook - ePubLanguage Competence Across Populations
Toward a Definition of Specific Language Impairment
- Yonata Levy, Jeannette C. Schaeffer, Yonata Levy, Jeannette C. Schaeffer(Authors)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...This section examines what might be learned about brain research from the study of SLI. Acquired and developmental deficits of the same cognitive process often result in somewhat different patterns of impairment. Comparing these patterns may help isolate the essential properties of the process in question. In the case of grammatical processing, it is natural to compare SLI and Agrammatism, which is probably the purest form of acquired grammatical impairment. Agrammatism is caused by brain injury to the left hemisphere, usually in Broca’s area or its vicinity (cf. Zurif, 1995). There are some general similarities between currently accepted clinical markers of Agrammatism and SLI. They come from three core domains of language performance: production, comprehension, and repetition. A widely accepted syntactic marker for SLI in many languages is the extended use of infinitives in syntactic contexts where finiteness is obligatory (Rice & Wexler, 1996; Wexler, chap. 1, and Rice, chap. 2, in this volume). When English-speaking children with SLI are matched on mean length of utterance with typically developing younger children (around 3 years old), the children with SLI make significantly more errors in tense production, even when performance on other inflections does not differ significantly between the two groups. Similarly, omitted or incorrect grammatical morphemes are a clinical hallmark of Agrammatism (Goodglass, 1976). Interestingly, in both SLI and Agrammatism, the structure of the relevant language seems to play a role in determining the type of errors produced: More omissions are seen in languages that allow bare roots as verbs, and more incorrect inflected forms are seen in languages that do not allow bare stems (but see Crago & Paradis, chap. 3 in this volume; Friedmann, 2001). Deficits in question formation might be part of this group of symptoms as well (van der Lely, chap...
- Lyndsey Nickels, Karen Croot, Lyndsey Nickels, Karen Croot(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...Less is known about the neural basis of grammatical production in cognitively healthy speakers; but again, neuroimaging studies have highlighted the left fronto-temporal-parietal language network for sentence production, in particular inferior frontal regions (Grande et al., 2012; Indefrey et al., 2004; Segaert et al., 2012). Lesion-deficit correlational studies of patients with stroke-induced Agrammatism support these neural activation patterns, although limitations in the interpretation of such studies diminish their contribution to understanding the neural mechanisms of language processing. Patients with agrammatic aphasia resulting from stroke evince lesions in this fronto-temporal-parietal network (i.e., middle cerebral artery lesions involving perisylvian frontal areas, extending posteriorly in many cases). As noted above, many patients with Agrammatism resulting from stroke show grammatical deficits across linguistic domains (i.e., grammatical morphology, functional categories, verb argument structure). Sentence comprehension deficits are also a major characteristic of agrammatic aphasia, associated with lesions in the left hemisphere inferior and middle frontal gyri, anterior temporal lobe and temporo-parietal junction (Bates et al., 2003; Caplan et al., 2007; Dronkers, Wilkins, Van Valin, Redfern, & Jaeger, 2004; Magnusdottir et al., 2012; Thothathiri, Kimberg, & Schwartz, 2012). Sentence production deficits are also associated with lesions in these regions (Bates et al., 2003; Borovsky, Saygin, Bates, & Dronkers, 2007), although few (if any) studies have directly examined the neural correlates of morphosyntactic production processes in stroke-induced aphasia. With regard to PPA, very few studies have correlated grammatical deficits with regions of cortical atrophy, apart from detailing general atrophy patterns associated with PPA variants, which, for PPA-G, reflects a complex of grammatical impairments...
- Amy E. Wenzel(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...In particular, word retrieval impairments, also known as anomia, are commonplace, in which the individual may be inaccurate or slow at coming up with the names of people, objects, locations, and actions. A variety of word retrieval errors, or paraphasias, are possible, including (a) phonemic or literal paraphasia: sounds or letters are incorrectly substituted, added, omitted, and/or rearranged in the target word; (b) semantic paraphasia: use of an incorrect word semantically related to the target word; (c) random paraphasia: use of an incorrect word with no apparent semantic relation to the target word; (d) circumlocution: use of a description or definition for the target word; and (e) neologism: use of a nonsense word. The term jargon is used when the anomia is so severe that output consists almost entirely or solely of paraphasias. Grammatical aspects of spoken and/or written output can also be compromised. Two grammar profiles that have been observed are (1) Agrammatism, characterized by reduced utterance length, lack or use of a limited set of function words (e.g., articles, conjunctions, pronouns), and simplified, incomplete, or restricted use of sentence types or grammatical forms and markers (e.g., omits the “ed” past tense marker); and (2) parAgrammatism, characterized by typical utterance length but incorrect use of function words and/or grammatical forms and markers. Aphasia Types Various classification systems have been forwarded to characterize the different patterns of language symptoms observed across individuals with aphasia. One common dichotomous classification system differentiates nonfluent and fluent types. In nonfluent aphasia, verbal output is impoverished (e.g., short or incomplete utterances), has reduced grammatical components (often agrammatic), and is produced with great effort and, thus, reduced rate and prosody or intonation...
