Inflection and computational load in agrammatic speech

In this study we investigate the production of verb inflection in agrammatic aphasia. In a number of recent studies it has been argued that tense inflection is harder to produce for agrammatic individuals than agreement inflection. However, results are still inconclusive, at least for Dutch and German. Here, we report three experiments in which this matter is further investigated. Our first goal was to determine whether tense was indeed more difficult to produce than agreement. Also, we investigated whether error rates were influenced by computational load. The results for nine Dutch-speaking agrammatic participants generally indicated that tense was indeed harder to produce than agreement, but that for both types of inflection, the number of errors increased with computational load. Taking care of word order and inflection induced more errors than taking care of just inflection. These findings are discussed in relation to current processing and representational models of agrammatic production.