Grammatical problem was one of the most prominent characteristics of speech in persons with aphasia (Gordon, 2006) and progressive aphasic syndromes (Knibb, Woollams, Hodges, & Patterson, 2009). Measures used to investigate the grammatical deficits on the discourse performance of persons with aphasia could be roughly classified into to two categories, one related to the level of lexicon, the other concerned with the level of syntax. Most of the measures belonged to the former category used words to analysis the variation on the speech performance, such as correct information units (CIUs; Nicholas & Brookshire, 1993), type token ratio (TTR); while the measures applied in studies related to the syntactic ability was more varied. Such as proportion of sentences well formed, auxiliary scores, proportion of verbs inflected, proportion of obligatory determiners in quantitative production analysis (QPA) (Gordon, 2006), and the mean length of the syntactic units, the proportion of syntactic units suggested by Lind, Kristoffersen, Moen, and Simonsen (2009). However, the measures used to depict the syntactic ability of a person was separated, could not provide a profile to reveal a pattern of syntactic ability in a consecutive picture. In order to develop a syntactic scoring system that can capture the changes in the characteristics of narrative speech, we adopted the concept from studies in child language development (Hsu, 2003) and widen the category to encompass the imperfect parts in natural speech. The applicability of this scoring system was firstly tested by the normal population in order to examine if the range of the scope is suitable for reflecting the expressive syntactic ability of a normal speaker
