Vocabulary grammatical structure in aphasic patients

In 10 aphasics (7 Broca's and 3 Wernicke's) of vascular etiology and 10 normal controls, a corpus of 2,500 words was selected in each subject by means of a standard interview. The 10 grammatical classes of the Romanian language were studied. The vocabulary reduction observed in aphasics was produced by the loss of nouns, adjectives and verbs. In exchange, proportionally to their vocabulary, they used more adverbs, pronouns and numerals than the normals. Articles, prepositions and conjunctions showed a similar use with that of the normals. The aphasic patients preserved basic words for each part of speech, the loss of vocabulary operated among the non-basic words. It was revealed by the Token-Type ratio that the verbal creativity was lower in aphasics than in controls. However, in normals as in aphasics verbal creativity was higher in the non-basic words than in the basic ones. The results are discussed by the action of different factors as: the semantic and syntactical constraints, semantic characteristics and syntactical functions proper to each class as well as the influence of the different amounts of words comprised in each grammatical class on the selection of the necessary word.