Gender and case in agrammatic production

Abstract

Omission and substitution of articles have often been mentioned as characteristics of agrammatic speech. In these descriptions, articles are considered to be so-called function words or closed-class words. These are supposed to be difficult for agrammatic speakers. From a linguistic point of view, the class of function words is far from homogeneous and even within the class of articles different linguistic properties can be distinguished. In many languages--Dutch, German, Italian and Portuguese are used as examples in this paper--the article is specified for gender. In German the article is specified for case as well. Gender and case differ from both a linguistic and a psycholinguistic point of view. Gender information is part of the word form. In some languages, gender can be derived from the word-form (as in Portuguese or Italian), while in other languages, the gender of nouns is stored as part of the word-form (as in Dutch and German). Case is a syntactic notion and relates to a dependency between the constituents in a sentence. Bearing in mind the fact that article production is impaired in agrammatic Broca's aphasia, one may wonder whether gender and/or case information plays a role here. For the present study, article production of nine Dutch and ten German individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia has been analyzed and the data show that most substitution errors concern case; the gender of the produced articles is usually correct. This supports the hypothesis that agrammatic speech is the consequence of an underlying deficit in syntactic processing.