Aphasics' Attention to Grammatical Morphemes

Abstract

The widespread clinical description of Broca's aphasics as having relatively preserved comprehension compared to their reduced production provided the focus of a study of aphasics' attention to definite and indefinite articles. Aphasics of four types — classical Broca's, classical Wernicke's, mixed anterior, and anomic — chose figures in response to sentences in which articles were used sometimes appropriately and sometimes anomalously. Measures of response latencies and observation of response choices showed that classical Broca's aphasics like the Wernicke's failed to attend to the articles. Only anomic aphasics performed similarly to normals. It is suggested that agrammatism precludes attention to normally semantically empty morphemes.