Morphological-syntactic deficits in the production of Slovak-speaking aphasic patients

Abstract

Background: Grammatical deficits in aphasia have been the subject of research in many languages. It is stated that the symptoms vary depending on morphological-syntactic properties of a studied language. Only a few studies have mapped the symptoms of the grammatical impairment in inflective languages, but the Slovak language has not been studied so far. Aims: The primary aim of our study was to map grammatical deficits in aphasic patients speaking Slovak by analysing some aspects of morphology and syntax. We studied the influence of the type of aphasia, the degree of non-fluent aphasia, and the method eliciting speech on the fluency of patients' production. Methods & Procedures: We analysed production in 7 patients with anomic and 4 patients with non-fluent (Broca's) aphasia. Patients with Broca's aphasia were divided into 2 groups according to the fluency of their production. The speech of patients with a more severe degree of aphasia consisted of content words separated with long pauses. Production of patients with a mild degree of Broca's aphasia was non-fluent sometimes full of perseverations, repairs and false starts but with some syntactic organisation. The samples of spontaneous speech were obtained with two methods: interview and picture description. The speech production of patients was tape-recorded, transcribed, and analysed. The analysis included various aspects of morphology and syntax. Outcomes & Results: According to our results, patients with anomic aphasia did not have apparent problems with any aspect of morphology, but errors occurred on the level of complex syntactic constructions. The speech production of patients with Broca's aphasia was deficient and some symptoms (the use of grammatical morphemes, contextually disallowed verbal ellipses) varied depending on the degree of aphasia. Conclusions: This analysis revealed morphological-syntactic deficits in Slovak-speaking aphasic patients. The results indicate that the symptoms depend not only on the type of aphasia but also on the degree of Broca's aphasia. We compared these results with studies carried out in other languages (for example, Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Hungarian, Turkish).