ABSTRACT
As previous chapters in this book have indicated, the core feature of agrammatic aphasia is structurally impoverished sentence production. Utterances consist of simple canonical (subject-verb-object, in English) sentences or strings of words (non-sentences), in which verbs are often lacking. Even in confrontation naming, many patients with agrammatic aphasia show difficulty producing verbs as compared to nouns (Kim & Thompson 2000, 2004; Miceli et al. 1984; Zingeser & Berndt 1990; and many others). Grammatical morphemes, both free-standing and bound, also are frequently omitted and/or substituted and these patterns show up in both sentence and single word production. Many individuals with agrammatic speech production also present with asyntactic comprehension, which refers to difficulty interpreting noncanonical sentences, such as passives, object clefts, and object relatives, particularly in semantically reversible contexts (Caplan & Hildebrandt 1988).
