Background: Previous studies have shown that in semi-spontaneous speech, individuals with Broca's and anomic aphasia produce relatively many direct speech constructions. It has been claimed that in "healthy" communication direct speech constructions contribute to the liveliness, and indirectly to the comprehensibility, of speech.…

Time reference in Indo-European languages is marked on the verb. With tensed verb forms, the speaker can refer to the past (wrote, has written), present (writes, is writing) or future (will write). Reference to the past through verb morphology has been shown to be particularly vulnerable in agrammatic aphasia and both agrammatic and…

There is a long standing debate between aphasiologists on the essential factor that constitutes the behavioral patterns of loss and preservation in agrammatic Broca's aphasia. It has been suggested that linguistic complexity plays a crucial role: linguistically complex structures are more difficult to produce than linguistically simple ones.…

Dutch speakers with agrammatic Broca's aphasia are known to have problems with the production of finite verbs in main clauses. This performance pattern has been accounted for in terms of the specific syntactic complexity of the Dutch main clause structure, which requires an extra syntactic operation (Verb Second), relative to the basic…

Phonological theories have raised the notion of a universally preferred syllable type which is defined in terms of its sonority structure (e.g., Clements, 1990). Empirical evidence for this notion has been provided by distributional analyses of natural languages and of language acquisition data, and by aphasic speech error analyses. The present…