Morphosyntactic Deficits in Malayalam-Speaking Broca’s Aphasics

Aithal, Venkataraja U and Veena, KD and Rajashekhar, B (2009) Morphosyntactic Deficits in Malayalam-Speaking Broca’s Aphasics. Asia Pacific Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing, 12 (4). pp. 303-314.

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Abstract

Broca’s aphasia is the most classic form of nonfluent aphasia resulting in the reduction of linguistic proficiency termed as agrammatism. Syntactic deficit in Broca’s aphasics has been investigated in various languages. The present study attempted to investigate morphosyntactic deficits in Malayalam-speaking Broca’s aphasics. Eleven Broca’s aphasics with etiology of cerebrovascular accident served as subjects. Comprehension and expression of different morphosyntactic categories were investigated. Picture cards were used to elicit responses for syntactic comprehension and expression. A hierarchical order of difficulty in syntax evolved for both comprehension and expression. Future tense was the most difficult category to comprehend and participle construction and comparatives were the most difficult categories to express. A statistically significant difference existed between comprehension and expression performance in all the categories included excepting the present tense, past tense, and negatives. Findings of the morphosyntactic structures observed in Malayalam-speaking Broca’s aphasia are discussed.

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