AGRAMMATISM AND ADAPTATION THEORY

Ability to process grammatical structures was studied in 14 agrammatic speakers, 11 other non-fluent aphasics, five fluent aphasics and 10 n ormal controls. Adaptation theory maintains that spontaneous speech gi ves a poor indication of the underlying impairment, because agrammatic patients adopt a strategy of producing elliptical speech to avoid mak ing errors. It was therefore predicted that the pattern of grammatical errors should look different in tasks that minimized or prevented ada ptation, such as elicited speech, written sentence ordering and doze t asks. The grammatical profile of agrammatic aphasics did show some cha nge under eliciting conditions; they produced a higher proportion of v erbs in these circumstances and showed some ability to produce active transitive constructions that were not seen in spontaneous speech. How ever, elicitation had no effect on sentence length or complexity or us e of grammatical morphemes. Paragrammatic errors were seen in both agr ammatic and fluent aphasics under eliciting conditions, but were rare in both groups. In contrast to previous studies of German and Dutch ap hasic patients, it was found that omission of obligatory inflectional endings was particularly common in agrammatic speakers, both in sponta neous speech and on a doze task where such omissions could not be rega rded as strategic use of ellipsis.