Abstract
This study presents a linguistic experiment, grammaticality judgment testing in Czech patients with Broca's aphasia. The aim was to verify whether patients with this aphasia are able to distinguish between obligatory and optional verbal complements.
The underlying theoretical/methodological framework is that of functional-generative description of verb valency. Our paper presents judgments of grammatical vs. agrammatical sentential structures by two aphasic patients with slight and heavy cognitive deficit, respectively.
The authors were able to draw the following conclusions: 1. If a sentence is agrammatical due to violations of the government of the dependent arguments, both patients showed comprehension problems, whereas optional adverbial complements did not disturb comprehension in either of the two patients. 2.
Wrong government and wrong morphological marker were only helpful in detecting a defective syntactic structure in the patient showing slight cognitive deficit. 3. When evaluating the presented grammatically deficient material as correct, the patient with a heavy cognitive deficit relied in his comprehension on lexical and/or sentential semantics.
The results are interpreted in the framework of two widely used psycholinguistic models of language production/comprehension.