Abstract
In order to study characteristics of grammatical deficits, two non-right-handed aphasic patients with impaired sentence production, following left hemisphere lesions, are presented. The patients are a 49-year-old man (case A) and a 37-year-old woman (case B). A second group without grammatical deficits consisted of two right-handed nonfluent aphasics following left hemisphere lesions are also presented for contrast. We quantitatively analysed the syntactical and morphological aspects of their verbal expressions using stimulus drawings. The results were as follows: Case A produced very simple structured sentences and presented morphological problems, such as a tendency to use nouns, a reduction of units in predicates and errors (omissions and substitutions) of particles. He was considered to have both syntactical and morphological deficits. On the other hand, case B showed difficulties in structurizing sentences. Her ability to process grammatical morphemes was not much different, when compared with the right-handed aphasics, besides the substitutions of particles. Therefore, we speculated that her grammatical deficits were predominantly syntactical. We discuss these results based on a typology of agrammatism by Tissot, Mounin, Lhermitte et al. (1973).
