ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book reviews how agrammatism was thought about during the classical period of aphasia research, a period which has been a major influence on, and is the starting point of, modern research; the contribution of the Boston School; the principles of Cognitive Neuropsychology (CN). It explains that at the early stages of research into agrammatism, the omission of grammatical morphemes in speech was the most prominent feature of the relevant patients. Crucially, the economy of effort hypothesis explained only impairments of the production modality, simply because comprehension was thought to be unaffected. The book discusses the predominant relation to CN and the approach to neurological impairments in general. It aims at accounting for the omission of grammatical morphemes by identifying the linguistic features of the omitted items, and argued the reason for their omission.
