A hypothesis for the aphasic syndrome of aggramatism--the omission of function words and inflectional morphemes--is presented. The author tests and illustrates the efficacy of closely observing substantive universals of grammatical structure in proposing accounts of linguistic defects. (Author/MV)

The justification for Kean's (EJ 165 107) analysis of agrammatism as a phonological disorder rests on a certain specific theory of the structure of human language faculty, which is summarized. Simply proposing a competing analysis based on a distinct theory does not falsify the hypotheses. However, Kean's claims are subject to empirical…

Kean (EJ 165 107) presented a linguistic model to account for the features of the syndrome of Broca's aphasia, especially their agrammatism. This paper critiques Kean's paper by describing and evaluating her five major arguments. It is concluded that Kean's phonological model cannot account for agrammatism as well as syntactic models can.…

Two claims essential to Kean's interpretation (EJ 165 107) that Broca's aphasia results in a phonological disorder rather than a syntactic or morphological disorder are disputed. The claim that the plural morpheme is derivational, and the postulation of the notion of the phonological word are shown to have no linguistic motivation. (Author/RD)

Investigated the source of agrammatic aphasic patients' difficulty comprehending semantically reversible sentences. Found approximately equal distributions of three distinct patterns. Results conflict with explanations of comprehension failure which state that a single pattern of performance on sentence structures characterizes comprehension of…