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 aphasia 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 their 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 errors, we did not expect them to consist in omission of inflectional endings but rather erroneous 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, shorter, and contained fewer subordinate verbs than those produced by control participants. They also produced shorter words, although this difference was less marked. The derivational morphology appeared relatively spared while the inflectional forms on verbs displayed reduced diversity. Participants with aphasia did not systematically produce morphological errors.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 impaired functional morphology characterises non-fluent aphasia. Our findings are best explained by crosslinguistically-informed morphosyntactic account grounded in cognitive mechanisms.