Grain orientation fragmentation is studied in a set of 176 individual grains of an aluminium polycrystal deformed in plane strain compression at 400 degrees C to a strain of epsilon = 1.2. Experimental observations were made by EBSD at successive strains of 0, 0.42, 0.77 and 1.2 on the internal surface of a split sample. Statistics of the in-grain orientation spreads were computed based on approximately 3000 orientation measurements per grain. A high-resolution finite element simulation (about 1000 elements per grain) was carried out on a polycrystal whose grains were assigned the initial experimental crystal orientations. The experimental and simulation results were compared in terms of the fractions of grains that exhibit fragmentation and the lattice orientations of the fragmenting grains. The numbers of fragmented grains increase with strain, reaching values of 10% in the experiment (2-D characterization) and 20% in the simulation (3-D characterization) at epsilon = 1.2. For both experiment and simulation, fragmentation is more likely in grains whose lattice is symmetrically oriented with respect to the loading axes. Under plane strain compression, the orientations of the fragmented grains coincide with regions of orientation space in which the reorientation velocity field in the plane perpendicular to the reorientation velocity direction is unstable.