Semispontaneous speech in speakers of Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) with non-fluent aphasia

Background Few studies in aphasiology have investigated languages with a high degree of morphological complexity, and only one previous study has investigated aphasic speech in a polysynthetic language. Morphologically complex languages have great potential to inform theories of aphasia in general and agrammatic aphasia in particular. In the present study, we focus on one such language, namely Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic), which has unusually rich inflectional and derivational morphology.Aims The present study aimed to describe the semispontaneous speech of speakers of Kalaallisut with non-fluent aphasia with a specific focus on morphosyntactic characteristics. Based on previous studies, we hypothesised that participants’ aphasic speech would consist of relatively slow and short utterances, that morphological features would be less affected than syntactic features, and that verbs would be particularly affected. In case of grammatical aberrations, we did not expect them to consist in omission of inflectional endings but rather unconventional substitution of other forms.Methods & Procedures We elicited semispontaneous speech from 11 Kalaallisut speakers with non-fluent aphasia and 6 speakers without aphasia using pictures and questions about personal experiences. The speech samples underwent extensive morphosyntactic analyses.Outcomes & Results Participants with aphasia produced utterances that were slower and shorter and contained fewer subordinate verbs than those produced by control participants. They also produced shorter words, although this difference was smaller. The derivational morphology appeared relatively spared while the inflectional forms on verbs displayed reduced diversity. Participants with aphasia produced some lexical, syntactic, and morphological aberrations, most of which concerned omitted verbal inflections and substituted noun inflections.Conclusions Non-fluent aphasia in Kalaallisut is characterised by slow, short and syntactically simple utterances, which is similar to the characteristics of non-fluent aphasia in other languages. However, the morphology produced by individuals with non-fluent aphasia appears relatively spared which goes against the view that aberrant functional morphology characterises non-fluent aphasia. Our findings are best explained by crosslinguistically-informed morphosyntactic account grounded in cognitive mechanisms.