Adaptation symptoms and impairment symptoms in Broca's aphasia

Abstract

A fundamental distinction between two kinds of symptoms is described. Impairment symptoms are the direct output of a damaged system. Adaptation symptoms are behavioural abnormalities that are the result of a patient adapting to impairment. The way in which this distinction is applied to the phenomenon of agrammatism in sentence production is explained and the supporting evidence is reviewed. The basic assumption here is that agrammatic (telegraphic) speech results from the strategic choice for elliptical expressions. If no such choice is made, paragrammatic output will be produced. The impairment-adaptation dichotomy is then applied to a number of other symptoms of Broca's aphasia: dysprosody, low rate of speech, reduced variety of grammatical form, low performance on sentence repetition and auditory comprehension.