EXPLORING AGRAMMATISM IN ROMANIAN MOTOR APHASIC SPEECH. A SINGLE-CASE STUDY.

Motor aphasia has long been considered an agrammatic condition, characterized by the omission of functional items. Inquiries into the discourse of nonfluent aphasics from morphologically rich languages have caused researchers to reconsider the degree to which agrammatism characterizes motor aphasia. This article is a single-case study of a Romanian patient with motor aphasia. The speech is analyzed qualitatively, with particular emphasis on morphological errors. Contextualization is offered in order to understand the degree of agrammatic constructions in relation to the analyzed language. The article also presents a justification for single-case studies, a general description of the parameters of the subject's speech, and evidence for considering agrammatism in aphasic speech a result of the economy of effort hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]