Which of the following best describes agrammatism in the context of non-fluent aphasia?

Agrammatism is a characteristic of non-fluent aphasia, particularly associated with Broca's aphasia. It primarily involves the production of speech that lacks grammatical structure. This often manifests as the omission of function words (such as prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and articles) and certain functor words, leading to speech that can sound telegraphic or abbreviated. For example, a person might say "Want cookie" instead of "I want a cookie."

This speech pattern is a direct reflection of the individual’s difficulty with syntactic processing and constructing grammatically complete sentences, which is typical in non-fluent aphasia. The emphasis on omitting these types of words highlights the difficulty in accessing the grammatical components of language expression, making this choice the best representation of agrammatism in this context.

In contrast, the other choices describe different aspects of language processing or fluency but do not accurately characterize agrammatism, which is more specifically focused on the structural aspects of speech production.