The serious language disorder known as Broca’s aphasia (also called “motor aphasia”) is characterized by a substantially reduced amount of speech, distorted articulation and slow, often effortful speech. What is said often consists almost entirely of lexical morphemes (e.g. nouns, verbs). The frequent omission of functional morphemes (e.g. articles, prepositions) and inflections (e.g. plural -s, past tense -ed) has led to the characterization of this type of aphasic speech as “agrammatic.” In agrammatic speech, the grammatical markers are missing.

An example of speech produced by someone whose aphasia was not severe is the following answer to a question regarding what the speaker had for breakfast:

However, this type of disorder can be quite severe and result in speech with lots of hesitations and really long pauses (marked by …): my cheek … very annoyance … main is my shoulder … achin’ all round here. Some patients can also have lots of difficulty in articulating single words, as in this attempt to say “steamship”: a stail … you know what I mean … tal … stail. In Broca’s aphasia, comprehension is typically much better than production.