Individuals with agrammatic aphasia exhibit restricted patterns of impairment of functional morphemes, however, syntactic characterization of the impairment is controversial. Previous studies have focused on functional morphology in clauses only. This study extends the empirical domain by testing functional morphemes in English nominal phrases in aphasia and comparing patients' impairment to their impairment of functional morphemes in English clauses. In the linguistics literature, it is assumed that clauses and nominal phrases are structurally parallel but exhibit inflectional differences. The results of the present study indicated that aphasic speakers evinced similar impairment patterns in clauses and nominal phrases. These findings are consistent with the Distributed Morphology Hypothesis (DMH), suggesting that the source of functional morphology deficits among agrammatics relates to difficulty implementing rules that convert inflectional features into morphemes. Our findings, however, are inconsistent with the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH), which suggests that patients have difficulty building complex hierarchical structures.

中文翻译：

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从句和名词性短语中的平行功能类别缺陷：英语语法错误的案例

患有语法性失语症的个体表现出有限的功能语素损伤模式，然而，损伤的句法特征是有争议的。以前的研究仅关注从句中的功能形态。本研究通过测试失语症英语名词性短语中的功能语素并将患者的损伤与英语从句中功能语素的损伤进行比较来扩展经验领域。在语言学文献中，假设从句和名词性短语在结构上是平行的，但表现出屈折差异。本研究的结果表明，失语者在从句和名词性短语中表现出类似的损伤模式。这些发现与分布式形态学假说（DMH）一致，表明语法学中功能形态学缺陷的根源与难以实施将屈折特征转换为语素的规则有关。然而，我们的研究结果与树修剪假说（TPH）不一致，该假说表明患者难以构建复杂的层次结构。