Structural properties of syntactically reduced speech: A comparison of normal speakers and Broca’s aphasics

Abstract

We carried out a study in which we elicited spatial expressions from agrammatic and normal speakers by means of a picture description test. The purpose of our study was to investigate structural properties of Dutch agrammatic speech. We focussed on syntactic simplification phenomena that show up in addition to finiteness omission. We therefore invited the normal speakers to use sentences no longer than three or two words each and compared the picture descriptions of aphasic and normal speakers. In the picture descriptions two types of structures emerged that are relatively infrequent in free conversation: verbless predicative constructions with an adjectival head and intransitive prepositions as predicates. We have been able to show that the use of these construction types is directly related to syntactic reduction in both agrammatic and normal speech: it is present primarily in the speech of Broca’s aphasics who produce one- and two-word utterances and of control speakers with a word limitation by instruction in the same range. The choice of reduced construction types is determined by the syntactic complexity of the phrases involved. A compensation strategy was observed both in control and aphasic speech: if utterances are shorter, the number of utterances increases.