Pronominal and anaphoric reference in agrammatism

Abstract

Subjects with Broca's aphasia have been shown to display difficulties in on-line and off-line tasks involving personal pronouns and reflexives. Off-line tasks have indicated more errors with pronouns than with reflexives while the reverse has been found in on-line studies. In the present off-line study, the comprehension of sentences containing personal pronouns and reflexives is examined in a group of 10 agrammatic participants. Results indicate that subjects had difficulties with both pronouns and reflexives, particularly with reflexives in sentences that contained a quantificational antecedent, as well as with pronouns in exceptional case marking constructions. It is argued that the low performance that subjects exhibited as a group in pronouns and reflexives indicates two distinct impairments, one that concerns coreference and one that concerns A-dependencies, the latter being a manifestation of a general processing failure to link positions. Poor performance on exceptional case marking constructions compared to simple transitive sentences is claimed to be interpreted within theories for reference assignment that distinguish between the two sentence types.