Double-agents and trace-deletion in agrammatism

The Trace-Deletion Hypothesis thenceforth TDH; Grodzinsky 1986, 1995) state s that syntactic traces are deleted in agrammatism and that whenever a trac e is deleted, a default strategy is activated. The default strategy assigns the role of Agent to the first NP. In structures where a second NP receive s the Agent role syntactically, the consequence is that the agrammatic repr esentation contains two conflicting Agents for the same action. This is the mechanism that induces guessing and the random performance on comprehensio n tests that has often been observed for passives and certain other structu res. In this paper, we isolate the default strategy of the TDH, using a sen tence-picture matching task in which one of the pictures matches the meanin g arrived at by the default strategy. Our results show that an agrammatic r epresentation does not involve double-Agents, and thus the default strategy land therefore the TDH) is refuted. (C) 1998 Academic Press.