The influence of educational level and occupational status on the spoken language production of persons with agrammatic aphasia

Abstract

Can educational background and occupational status have an influence on the spoken language production of persons with agrammatic aphasia? This study is an attempt to answer this question based on the investigation of speech production of three American high school and three American university educated persons with agrammatic aphasia. Syntactic, morphological, semantic, phonological and lexical analyses have been performed on the data. Part of the syntactic and lexical analysis of this paper is compared with the corpus findings of the Longman Grammar of spoken and written English. The result of the analyses have been compared both within the participants and between the groups. The findings of this study show that there is a difference between the language performances of these two groups. The university graduate subjects used a greater number of words and grammatical categories and they made considerably less linguistic errors in their speech than the high school graduate participants.