Finds common ground and hence a common definition

1. AGRAMMATISM: CROSS LANGUAGE CONTRIBUTIONS By Peter Browne Menn and Obler (1990) “A language disorder due to acquired brain damage, characterised by slow, halting speech, by short and-or fragmentary sentences, and by limited output use of the syntactic and morphological resources of language”. Kean (1985) “a disorder of sentence production involving the selective omission of function words and some grammatical endings on words”. BENEFITS Neurolinguistics – links between brain structures and language impairments, and therefore better treatment. Psycholinguistics – models of information flow in the brain, dependant and independent structures and functions. Linguistics – language and its use, and therefore improved details and interaction of linguistic areas. CROSS LANGUAGE RESEARCH English – word order problems to signify case relations • Finds common ground and hence a common definition • Ambiguous impairments in one language are clear in another • Prevent premature generalisations • BUT a lot more research needs to be done before definitive answers can be found. German – different use for word order Finnish – inflection based case relations It is not so simple, it is a combination of factors Comprehension Difficult to draw conclusions, but there are some links! Unitary or fragmentary? Many many views

2. CONCLUSIONS References: Goodglass, H (1993) Lesser, R and Milroy, L (1993) Kean, M (1985) Malatesha, R N and Aaron, P G (1982) Menn, L and Obler L K (1990) Stenner, B and Whitaker, H A (1998) More of a collection of entities than clearly defined disorder Agrammatism can be defined by short phrases and slow speech with simplified syntax and reduced phrase variety Free grammatical morphemes are often omitted or substituted Bound morphemes are either omitted or substituted according to the language Morphological substitutions are rarely changed by more than one feature Discourse controlled grammatical morphemes are used frequently Omission and retention of morphemes is often governed by an interaction between lexical and syntactic factors Where word order is grammatically controlled, the canonical word order is usually followed Clause structure is often very basic EnglishIcelandic he looks he look hann horf-ir hann horf-i he looked he look hann horf-ð-i hann horf-ir dogs dog hund-ar hund-ur daddy’s car daddy car pabb-a bill pubb-i bill Ø morphs? Substitution or omission? INCONCLUSIVE