Agrammatism: Neurolinguistics of Grammatical Impairment in Hindi Aphasia

Agrammatism is the outstanding feature of Broca's aphasia. Traditionally, it is defined as the selective lack of availability to the patient, for both production and comprehension, of closed class items (function words) and inflectional grammatical morphemes with relative preservation of uninflected nouns, verbs and adjectives. (Nadeu and Rothi, 1992). The concept of agrammatism revolves round the deficits in syntax and morphology.

For the present study, agrammatic data was collected from Hindi speaking subjects. The subjects included both males and females. The goals of the study have been: examination of Hindi agrammatic evidence; identification of its morphological and syntactic features; to examine whether agrammatic data from Hindi show the same features as are exhibited by agrammatics from other linguistic groups and to identify general features of agrammatism.

Observations made in relation to the tests administered to the subjects have provided data in each case. Data were thus recorded, transcribed and observations were processed, analysed, and interpreted to yield conclusions.