Syntactic Judgment in Non-Fluent (Broca’s) Aphasia and Neuro- Typical Participants: A Comparison

Abstract

Earlier research on persons with non- fluent aphasia especially concentrated on the expression related difficulties, agrammatism component etc. Eventually researchers focused on the comprehension related difficulties in these persons with no- fluent aphasia especially persons with Broca’s aphasia. These persons will have milder comprehension deficits which would reflect as poor performance on meta-linguistic judgment tasks especially syntactic judgment task. The other view in the same line of research attributes poor performance on syntactic judgment to the agrammatic component associated with non-fluent aphasia claiming that the syntactic comprehension difficulty is parallel with agrammatism component associated. The present study aimed at testing grammatical judgment abilities in persons with Broca’s aphasia. 5 persons with Broca’s aphasia and 20 neuro-typical participants were recruited for the study. Syntactic judgment task was carried out on all these participants by using 15 correct, 15 grammatically incorrect and 10 semantically incorrect sentences were used. Persons with Broca’s performed poorly compared to neuro-typical group. The performance of neuro typical participants did not vary much with respect to the three types of stimuli used. While persons with Broca’s aphasia showed more difficulty in judging grammatically incorrect sentences followed by semantically correct sentences.