The elusive character of agrammatism

Abstract

Traditionally, agrammatism was viewed as a restricted disorder of speech production which was associated with Broca's aphasia. This view has been replaced by a more complex picture which involves a range of linguistic impairments in both language production and comprehension. These disorders have been variously characterized as deficits, in the representation of linguistic structures and deficits in the on-line computation of sentence structures and their interpretations. A variety of analyses of production and comprehension in agrammatism, invoking both representational and computational analyses, are reviewed. Each has inadequacies, but, at the same time, it is argued that each also advances the understanding of agrammatism.