The Study of the Syntactic Features in Aphasic Patients' Speech

The purpose of the present research is to investigate the syntactic characteristics in the production of Persian-speaking aphasic patients. To this end, the spontaneous speech of four right-handed monolingual Broca's aphasic patients were assessed. The study examined patterns of production of free and bound grammatical and lexical morphemes in the aphasic spontaneous speech, as well as the usage of verb inflections with respect to agreement, tense, aspect and negation features. To evaluate the syntactic performance of the subjects, the Persian Bilingual Aphasia Test was initially administered and in the next stage, samples of their spontaneous speech production were obtained and analyzed. The
analysis of the data indicated that they had deficits in syntactic features, such as deletion and substitution of verbs, problems in using appropriate verbal inflections and deletion of the direct object article “rā”. The patients had also some errors in using free grammatical morphemes of prepositions, personal pronouns and conjunctions. Nouns were the most
frequent category in the speech of the aphasic patients. By contrast, adjectives and adverbs were rarely used by them. The results derived from this research confirm the findings of the previous research in other languages and indicate that there are similar patterns of behavior in agrammatism across different languages.