Comprehension and production of movement-derived sentences by Russian speakers with agrammatic aphasia

Abstract

This study explored the way Russian speakers with agrammatism understand and repeat movement-derived sentences, and examined whether they use morpho-syntactic cues to assist comprehension. The comprehension of three Russian-speaking individuals with agrammatism was tested, and their performance was compared to 15 matched control participants. In addition, the repetition ability of one of the participants was assessed. The study included topicalization structures, relative clauses, and SVO sentences. The individuals with agrammatism performed at chance level on topicalization structures and object relative clauses, whereas their comprehension of SVO sentences and subject relatives was significantly better and above chance. Their comprehension of topicalization structures was poor although all sentences included morphological cues of case marking on the topicalized object and on the subject. Case and gender morphology on the relative pronoun did not lead to better comprehension of object relative clauses compared to relative clauses in which gender inflection could not be used as a cue for interpretation. The repetition task indicated a considerable difficulty in repetition of sentences that include syntactic movement to high nodes of the syntactic tree.