Agrammatism of Chinese transcortical aphasics

Abstract

This paper will present two cases of Chinese agrammatism from the point of view of neurolinguistics. The patients are: (1) a 54-year-old right-handed male and (2) a 47-year-old right-handed female. They both showed clear symptoms of transcortical aphasia postoperatively, because they were aphasic in all respects but could repeat quite well. On the basis of this diagnosis, a series of neurolinguistic tests was conducted to determine the extent of their language impairment. This presentation, however, will be concerned mainly with the aspect of agrammatism displayed in their deficits, although there are many other deficits that were also detected during the examinations. Chief among the deficits is the patients' inability to construct simple sentences correctly, either by way of auditory input (e.g., each patient was given a sentence verbally and then asked to construct that sentence using word cards made available to the patient ahead of time) or even through self-instructed arrangement (i.e., each patient was given several word cards that could be made into at least one grammatical sentence and then asked to arrange those cards on his/her own into that sentence). The second task was much harder for the patients. The results indicate that both patients made errors not so much at the beginning of a sentence as in the middle and/or at the end of a sentence most of the time. Obviously, only two cases of agrammatism will not suffice to demonstrate any reliable anatomico-behavioral correlation that makes sense in terms of language functions and brain organization. However, we feel that our presentation is the first in the history of aphasiology which pertains to agrammatism in Chinese and that as such a step is taken we have indicated a new direction which will certainly shed light on how neurolinguistics can contribute to the understanding of cerebral functions in language behavior, especially when the language at focus is Chinese of which very little, if any, clinical data are available in the literature. In this sense, we have made a small but significant contribution.