Broca's aphasia: a syntactic and/or a morphological disorder? A case study.

The patient described here suffers from Broca's aphasia without a comprehension disorder. She is unique, since she has two speech styles available and she shifts between them spontaneously. One style is characterized by a mild syntactic disorder and the other by a quite severe morphological and syntactic disorder. None of the current theories about the underlying disorder in Broca patients without comprehension deficits can account for the fact that two linguistically different speech styles can occur in one patient, except the adaptation theory. It will be argued that both styles can be explained by the assumption of an impairment to the grammatical encoder (a processor which transforms the preverbal message into a surface structure, Levelt, 1989). This view suggests that the distinction between syntactic and morphological agrammatism could be a matter of strategy, rather than of impairment.