Judgements of grammaticality in aphasia: The special case of Chinese

Theories of agrammatism have been challenged by the discovery that agrammat ic patients can make above-chance judgements of grammaticality. Chinese pos es an interesting test of this phenomenon, because its grammar is so auster e, with few obligatory features. An on-line grammaticality judgement task w as conducted with normal and aphasic speakers of Chinese, using the small s et of constructions that do permit judgements of grammaticality in this lan guage. Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics showed similar patterns, with above- chance discrimination between grammatical and ungrammatical forms, suggesti ng once again that Broca's aphasics are not unique in the degree of sparing or impairment that they show in receptive grammar. However, even for young normals, false-negative rates were high. We conclude that there is some se nsitivity to grammatical well-formedness in Chinese aphasics, but the effec t is fragile for aphasics and probabilistic for normals, reflecting the pec uliar status of grammaticality in this language.