The retrieval and inflection of verbs in the spontaneous speech of fluent aphasic speakers

Fluent aphasia of the anomic and Wernicke’s type is characterized by word retrieval difficulties. However, in fluent aphasic speech, grammatical deviations have been observed as well. There is debate as to whether these grammatical problems are caused by the word retrieval deficit, by an additional grammatical deficit, or by an integration deficit.

Verbs are an interesting word class in this respect, because they are among the words that are hardest to retrieve for many fluent aphasic speakers and some forms require a considerable amount of grammatical computation. For production of a finite lexical verb, the lexical form and inflection for tense and agreement need to be integrated. Next....