PROCESSING ARTICLES AND PRONOUNS IN AGRAMMATIC APHASIA - EVIDENCE FROM FRENCH

The hypothesis that closed-class items which participate in theta-role assignment are less problematic in agrammatism than items which do no t (Rizzi, 1985) is put to an empirical test. Five French-speaking agra mmatic patients were tested in a sentence-picture matching paradigm to probe their comprehension of sentences containing articles, which are not involved in theta-role assignment, and of sentences containing pr onouns, which in the direct object position are homophonous with artic les and are theta-role assignees. Gender was used as a variable to dif ferenciate between target and distracter. The data indicate that prono uns are significantly more difficult to process than articles. This re sult disconfirms the claim that the availability of grammatical inform ation encoded in closed-class items is a function of their involvement in theta-role assignement. The present study demonstrates that the ab ility to process gender marked articles is generally well preserved in French-speaking agrammatic patients. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.