The distribution of major grammatical classes in the vocabulary of Romanian aphasic patients

Abstract

A corpus of 2500 words was collected from 10 aphasics (seven Broca's and three Wernicke's) and 10 normal controls by means of a standard interview. The four major grammatical classes were studied: nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. In terms of vocabulary items, aphasic patients showed a smaller number of nouns, adjectives and verbs, but a larger number of adverbs. At the same time a higher frequency of noun, adjective and adverb tokens was revealed, but not of verbs. It has been ascertained that aphasics preserved «basic words» from the four grammatical classes; their vocabulary reduction resulted from the reduced proportion of non-basic words. The type–token ratio showed that verbal creativity was lower in aphasics than in controls. However, in normals, as in aphasics, verbal creativity was higher in non-basic words than in basic ones. The results are explained by various constraints: semantic, contextual, syntactic and grammatical classes which are effective to some degree even in aphasics' speech.