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AbstractThis study examined pronoun production in the sentences of agrammatic speakers. A Sentence Generation task that asks each subject to create a sentence from a given, uninflected transitive verb was administered to nine agrammatic aphasics and 20 matched normal control speakers. Sentences that contained at least two arguments of the verb, one PreVerb NP and one Post Verb NP, were examined to determine what proportion of each NP position was filled by the following NP types: Pronoun, General Noun, or Specific NP (e.g. ‘he’, ‘man’, or ‘teacher’, respectively). The normal speakers tended to use pronouns as PreVerb NPs and specific lexical terms as PostVerb NPs (Kohn and Pustejovsky 1994). Aphasic performance that was two standard deviations or more from the normal mean was judged to be abnormal. All but one aphasic subject departed from the normal data. The remaining aphasic subjects fell into three deficit groups, each defined by a significant increase in comparison to the control subjects for one of the three NP types. In each deficit group the overall distribution of NP types by NP position suggested an underlying cause, for which pronoun use figured centrally into the explanation. Increased Pronoun use was associated with a decreased use of Specific NPs, suggesting impaired word finding at the level of accessing sentence-based, as opposed to category-based, lexical associations. Increased use of General Nouns was associated with a severe avoidance of pronouns, while an increased use of Specific NPs was associated with milder pronoun avoidance. The tendency for the aphasic subjects to produce anomalous sentences (i.e. with syntactic and/or semantic errors) provided additional insight into the mechanisms underlying the response to pronouns in each deficit group.