Stoornissen in De Zinsvorm Bij Afasie

Aggrammatism is a disorder of sentence production which is typically observed in the context of Broca's aphasia. This paper does two things. First, a model of normal sentence production, proposed by Garrett (1975), is described and it is demonstrated how two phonological and two syntactic hypotheses of agrammatism can be deduced from this model. Three of these appear to correspond with hypotheses already proposed in the literature, while one of them - a syntactic one - is new. Second, a new experimental paradigm is described that seems to be capable of discriminating between at least a number of these approaches. The technique involves training patients to produce sentences of a particular form (e.g. the lion is able to kill, the child is anxious to drink) and then testing them on sentences of the same form but of a different underlying syntactic structure (e.g. the lion is easy to kill, the book is pleasant to read).Results obtained from American patients do not support a phonological type of approach to agrammatism. Furthermore, an analysis of errors appears to provide a basis for choosing between the two hypotheses.