Agrammatism on inflectional bound morphemes: a case study of a Hindi-speaking aphasic patient

In this report, we discuss a Hindi agrammatic patient who exhibited greater difficulty with the production of inflectional bound morphemes than with function words. The patient retained the metalinguistic judgement to differentiate function words with semantic content, such as postpositions which mark case functions in Hindi. His impaired ability to produce bound inflections also affected his retrieval of verbs; this failure to retrieve verbs was not due to anomia. Further neurolinguistic analyses of synthetic languages would seem likely to extend our understanding of syntactic processes.