Exploring aphasic grammar 2: do language testing and conversation tell a similar story?

This paper investigates the grammatical difficulties of an English-speaking person with non-fluent aphasia using clinical assessments based on picture description and story telling. The same individual's conversation grammar, which was investigated in detail in a linked article is reviewed here, and the notion that interactional grammatical phenomena may not necessarily be visible in elicited language data is explored. Data analysis shows that the aphasic speaker's grammar looks considerably different in the context of clinical assessment than it does in conversation. Analysis of elicited grammar reveals that the majority of utterances produced are subject-verb-object (SVO) type sentences, whereas prior analysis of conversation data indicated patterns of interactional grammatical phenomena that differ from such sentence types. It is suggested that language tests and conversation provide complementary but essentially different information about grammatical abilities. The clinical implications of this finding are discussed.