A Comparison of the Oral Syntactic Performance of Alcoholic and Non-Alcoholic Adults

Oral language samples of alcoholic and non-alcoholic male and female adults were compared to determine the effects of the chronic ingestion of alcohol on oral syntax. Subjects viewed a series of selected pictures, and audio recordings were made of their spoken reactions. Transcriptions of the linguistic output of each subject were analyzed according to Laura Lee's Developmental Sentence Scoring procedure. Syntactic performance was examined in reference to the occurrence of eight grammatical items, the degree of syntactic completeness and the mean syntactic complexity. Alcoholic subjects committed a greater number of syntactic and semantic errors than did non-alcoholics and displayed a minimal deficit in the integrative aspect of expressive language. Further investigation is suggested in such areas as the effect of other neurotoxins on language performance and the effect of pre-morbid alcoholism on patterns of aphasic disturbance and recovery.