[Agrammatism and its symptoms]

Abstract

Introduction: We present a review the issue of agrammatism in order to examine its symptoms, the regularity with which they are observed, and the proposals suggested within the framework of Cognitive Neuropsychology to account for them.

Development: First, we focus on the debate regarding the status of agrammatism as an aphasic category with both theoretical and clinical validity, presenting two confronted views. On the one hand, the view that argues against the category of agrammatism due the variable performance of agrammatic patients in linguistic tasks. On the other hand, we present the view of those authors who defend, despite the variability, the notion of agrammatism as an aphasic syndrome. In the second section of the paper, we discussed the different symptoms that, on the basis of the available evidence, have been associated to agrammatism and the proposed explanations. We start by discussing the symptoms that agrammatic patients present in language production; in particular, we highlight the following: a) problems related to grammatical morphemes; b) a reduced sentence length; c) a noun-verb dissociation, with a better performance with nouns; d) difficulties in sentence construction, and finally, e) alteration in word order. Then, we discuss the symptoms that agrammatic patients have shown in language comprehension.

Conclusion: In general, on the basis of the different agrammatic symptoms we have discussed, we favour the view of agrammatism as multicomponential syndrome rather than unitary one, with deficits in both morpholexical and syntactic language components.