A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF GRAMMATICAL MORPHOLOGY IN SPANISH-SPEAKING AND ENGLISH-SPEAKING AGRAMMATIC PATIENTS

To account for cross-linguistic differences in agrammatism, Bates and her colleagues have employed the Competition Model, proposing that the cue validity and cue costs of a grammatical morpheme in a particular language will directly affect how agrammatism is manifested. Using Goo dglass et al.'s (1993) Morphosyntax Battery in English and a translate d version in Spanish, we analyzed the use of equivalent grammatical st ructures in production and comprehension by agrammatic speakers of the two Languages. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests revealed that the relative order of difficulty in both production and comprehension of various gr ammatical morphemes was the same for both Spanish- and English-speakin g agrammatic patients, with two exceptions: (1) the Spanish-speaking a grammatics were relatively better at producing subject-verb agreement, and (2) the Spanish speakers were significantly worse at comprehendin g both active and passive voice sentences. The Competition Model can e xplain the performance differences regarding subject-verb agreement an d comprehension of active voice sentences, but it cannot account for t he differences seen in comprehending passive voice sentences.