On manifestations of aphasia in Catalan: a case study of Broca's aphasia

Abstract

This paper discusses a case of Broca's aphasia in light of the impact of the structure of the patient's mother tongue, Catalan, on the types of errors he makes. What seems to be most affected in the present case, in terms of Kolk's (1995) theory of “structural simplification” —proposed originally for sentence production and comprehension—are those linguistic levels that are most complex in Catalan: closed class word morphology and verb morphology as well as production and comprehension of sentences with non-canonical word order. The types of errors presented always occur in structurally obligatory contexts where the semantic or propositional content of the omitted or misused elements is rather small. Another important fact to bear in mind when studying Catalan aphasics is that, due to the bilingualism of all speakers, some of the signs and symptoms of aphasic speech have to be interpreted in light of the rival language, Spanish.