Features of agrammatism in Polish — A case study

Abstract

Much recent research in aphasia has been devoted to the characterization of the syndrome of agrammatism. At the same time, it has become increasingly clear that at least some aphasic syndromes and most notably agrammatism are deficits which are most precisely described along grammatical lines rather than according to the various linguistic activites such as comprehension, reading and writing. The realization that aphasic deficits are selective along grammatical lines has important consequences, since it provides us with an excellent opportunity to bridge the gap between theories of language structure and aphasiology. The interest in agrammatism has in turn led to expanding the studies to languages representing different structural types in order to explore the effect of the specific structure on the disruption of language in aphasia. This article will deal with the issue of the selectivity of grammatical breakdown and the dissociation between various grammatical subcomponents in the language of a Polish agrammatic patient who has been studied longitudinally for the last three years. More specifically, the selectivity of the impairment of the inflectional morphology with relative preservation of derivational morphology will be discussed. Also, the dissociation between the preservation of syntactic order and impairment in syntactic agreement and government in the same aphasic patient are described.