The Comprehension of Number and Gender Information on Pronouns in Dutch Broca’s aphasia

Samenvatting

The comprehension of pronouns is selectively impaired in agrammatic patients (e.g. Grodzinsky et al., 1993, Ruigendijk et al. in press). The present study aims at discerning between two theoretical models (Reflexivity, by Reinhart & Reuland, 1993 and Primitives of Binding by Reuland, 2001) by examining the agrammatic ability to use morphosyntactic features of number and gender when interpreting pronouns. It is possible that this type of information on the pronoun if accessible to the agrammatic patients could aid them in the comprehension. We examined six agrammatic speakers with a grammaticality judgment task. The results show that agrammatic patients do have access to the number and gender information on the pronoun and do use it when deciding on the referent for the pronoun. Our results indicate that morphosyntactic information can be accessed in agrammatism and used to aid the comprehension. We argue that these results can be explained within Reuland’s Primitives of Binding theory in combination with the often-made claim in the literature regarding the limitation of processing resources in agrammatic speakers.