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Cognitive Reserve (CR) refers to cognitive resources acquired through experiences along the lifespan that allow for flexibility in coping with neurocognitive changes. Investigating the role of CR measures across well-established psycholinguistic features can provide new insight into how CR interplays with cognition. Sixty-five Italian older adults performed a Lexical Decision, a Semantic Matching and a Sentence Reading task. We observed the effects of CR on reaction times and accuracy while varying lexical frequency (high vs low) and lexical semantics (concrete vs abstract) and on reading times of sentences with either syntactic or semantic violations. In the Lexical Decision and Semantic Matching tasks, CR played a role in processing low frequency and abstract words. In the Sentence Reading Task, CR influenced reading times, particularly in the presence of syntactic violations. CR predicts cognitive performance in tasks that require language demands at different levels.

Although lexicosemantic deficits are not typically seen in older adults, some studies indicate that age-related changes in semantic processing may occur. We had groups of older and younger adults perform speeded lexical decision on mass (e.g., honey), count (e.g., car), and dual nouns, which may be either mass or count (e.g., lamb). Singular dual nouns engendered significantly faster response times in older adults than mass and count nouns, whereas younger adults manifested similar response times to count and dual nouns. These results point toward a three-way distinction in the lexicon between mass, count, and dual nouns. Older adults appear to treat a larger set of nouns as dual than do younger adults. This may be due to awareness of the mass/count ambiguity present in a greater number of lexical items, as a result of their greater linguistic experience. Alternatively, in order to conserve processing resources, older adults may not activate mass/count information when recognizing a dual noun unless a mass or count reading is forced by context. Resume Meme si les deficits lexicosemantiques ne sont par releves de facon systematique chez les adultes plus âges, certaines etudes revelent que des changements lies a l'âge dans le traitement semantique peuvent se produire. Nous avons demande a des groupes d'adultes plus jeunes et plus âges d'effectuer des decisions lexicales accelerees relativement a la masse (p.ex. le miel), le denombrement (p. ex. les voitures) et les noms doubles, qui peuvent concerner soit la masse ou le nombre (p. ex. agneau). Les noms doubles singuliers ont entraine des temps de reponse significativement plus courts chez les adultes plus âges que les noms de masse ou de denombrement, alors que les adultes plus jeunes manifestaient des temps de reponse semblables pour les noms de denombrement et de masse. Ces resultats semblent demontrer une distinction a trois voies dans le lexique entre la masse, le denombrement et les noms doubles. Les adultes plus âges semblent traiter un ensemble de noms comme double davantage que ne le font les adultes plus jeunes. Cela pourrait etre cause par une sensibilisation a l'ambiguite dans la masse/denombrement qui se trouve dans un plus grand nombre de termes lexicaux, en consequence de leur plus grande experience linguistique. En revanche, afin d'economiser leurs ressources de traitement, les adultes plus âges pourraient ne pas activer l'information sur la masse/denombrement lorsqu'ils reconnaissent un nom double a moins qu'une lecture de masse ou de denombrement ne soit forcee par le contexte. A considerable body of research on aging has revealed that various aspects of cognitive function are subject to age-related decline. These decrements appear in a variety of tasks, including memory tasks that require self-initiated processing, such as cued and free recall (Park, 2000) and tasks tapping into episodic memory (Burke, MacKay, & James, 2000; Light, 1996; Wingfield & Stine-Morrow, 2000; for a review, see Craik, 2000). Older adults also manifest deficits in certain language tasks, such as word-finding difficulty (Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 199D and difficulty in retrieving proper names (Cohen & Faulkner, 1986; Maylor, 1990). There are, however, aspects of cognitive processing that appear to be well-preserved in healthy older adults. They are not typically thought to exhibit impairments on tasks that reflect the organization of lexicosemantic knowledge, such as generation of word associations (Bowles, Williams, & Poon, 1983; Burke & Peters, 1986; Lovelace & Cooley, 1982) and category exemplars (Howard, 1980). Likewise, online studies examining lexicosemantic processing have shown similar response patterns in older and younger adults. For example, frequency has been found to have similar effects on lexical decision in the two populations, although overall reaction times (RTs) are somewhat slower in older adults (Alien, Madden, & Crozier 1991; Alien, Madden, Weber, & Groth, 1993; Tainturier, Tremblay, & Lecours, 1989). …

The present study examines on-line processing of mass nouns (e.g. honey), count nouns (e.g. table) and dual (metonymic) nouns (e.g. chicken) in healthy elderly controls with no evidence of cognitive impairment, patients suffering from probable Alzheimer's disease (pAD), and patients diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Participants performed a lexical decision task using a go/no-go paradigm, where they responded to words but not non-words. Within-group comparisons revealed that elderly controls manifested longer reaction times to mass nouns and count nouns than to dual nouns, while pAD and MCI patients manifested longer latencies to mass nouns, but no significant difference between count and dual nouns. The way in which lexicosemantic knowledge breaks down in the case of memory impairment is discussed, and it is argued that breakdown in lexical representations may provide a sensitive early measure of cognitive impairment.

The present study investigates the on-line performance of a non-fluent Bulgarian-speaking aphasic patient and nine matched control participants in the recognition of prefixed verbs. A visual primed lexical decision experiment was employed to probe the role of aspect, semantic transparency, and root status (free vs. bound) in the recognition patterns obtained. Controls' results showed aspect and transparency effects. The patient demonstrated facilitation for verb forms featuring bound roots, while showing inhibition on transparent forms with free-standing roots, pointing to difficulties with decomposition, but not with accessing stored forms. These results suggest that the patient had a problem at the level of morphological decomposition-based mechanisms.

The issue of regular-irregular past tense formation was examined in a cross-modal lexical decision task in Modern Greek, a language where the orthographic and phonological overlap between present and past tense stems is the same for both regular and irregular verbs. The experiment described here is a follow-up study of previous visual lexical decision experiments (Tsapkini, Kehayia, & Harema, 2002) that also addressed the regular-irregular distinction in Greek. In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of input modality in lexical processing and compared different types of regular and irregular verbs. In contrast to our previous intra-modal (visual-visual) priming experiments, in this cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming study, we found that regular verbs with an orthographically salient morphemic aspectual marker elicited the same facilitation as those without an orthographically salient marker. However, irregular verbs did not exhibit a different priming pattern with respect to modality. We interpret these results in the framework of a two-level lexical processing approach with modality-specific access representations at a surface level and modality-independent morphemic representations at a deeper level.

This research addresses the issues of frequency and regularity in verb reading and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in DLI francophones. A reading task probes response latencies and response accuracy for DLI and control participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are slower at reading verbs even if their mean accuracy rates are higher than controls'. Results also indicate that the type of suffix on the verb affects controls and DLI participants differently in their accuracy rates: DLI participants exhibit higher error rates on less frequent inflections, while controls do not. Finally, unusual patterns are found for DLI participants on regular versus irregular verbs: regular verbs are slower to be read by DLI participants. These results are compared to findings from a previous simple lexical decision study. They are interpreted as indicating that DLI word reading patterns are qualitatively different from those evidenced by controls.

In this paper we describe a non-fluent aphasic patient who presents a selective impairment in the inflectional morphology of verbs but not of nouns in a highly inflected language, Greek. Furthermore, the patient's impairment was observed in production, but not in comprehension. More specifically, the patient manifested a selective deficit in the production of past-tense forms that do not involve computation of the rule-based aspectual marker. The patient's deficit pattern indicates that morphological processes have to be considered in relation to grammatical class in models of lexical processing.

This study investigates the processing of polymorphemic words in a highly inflected language, Bulgarian. The roles of semantic transparency, aspect, and bound or free root status in the recognition of aspectual verb forms were probed in the visual modality in a simple lexical decision and a masked priming experiment at a short SOA. Results from the two experiments yielded effects of semantic transparency and morphological complexity, demonstrating that both factors influence the recognition of prefixed aspectual forms in Bulgarian and pointing toward different access procedures. In contrast, the status of the root did not influence recognition patterns, suggesting that free-standing and bound roots are equivalent lexical units of access and representation in Bulgarian.

This paper addresses the issues of frequency and morphological regularity in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in developmentally language-impaired (DLI) francophones. Two visual lexical decision experiments (one simple, one primed) probe response latencies and response accuracy in DLI participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are mainly sensitive to suffix frequency and show little or no priming effects from primes morphologically related to the target. Results also show that irregularly related primes do not facilitate recognition of the target by participants with DLI. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to “morphological families” in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency, and support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure. Results indicate that the organization of the mental lexicon of individuals with DLI differs significantly from that of controls.

The present study addresses the issue of morphological manifestations specific to non-fluent aphasia in Greek. The off-line performance of a Greek-speaking aphasic patient is investigated using Paradis'(1987) Bilingual Aphasia Test. His difficulties with inflectional morphology are further probed through a series of comprehension, production, repetition and reading tasks. Results obtained show a dissociation in the patient's processing of nouns and verbs related to language-specific morphological features of these grammatical categories. This study underscores the importance of taking the particularities of a given language into account when interpreting aphasic manifestations and sheds new light on the issue of syndrome variability.

The way spoken language is represented by orthographic structure is thought to influence the cognitive reading mechanism for a language, and therefore language breakdown patterns should reflect this. The present article focuses on two patients, both monolingual native Spanish speakers, who were able to read words but showed great difficulty in reading nonwords. This finding could be attributed to the fact that these patients were reading globally using a lexical route. This pattern of reading behavior is known as phonological dyslexia. It has been argued that lexical reading is not an option for Spanish readers since its orthography is highly regular. Our findings contradict this hypothesis and support the view that cognitive reading mechanisms are universal.

This study presents a cross-linguistic investigation of lexical access and subjects' sensitivity to the internal morphological structure of compounds in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Polish. The following questions were addressed: Are individual constituents activated during on-line word recognition? To what extent does internal morphological structure play a role during lexical access? Is there an interaction between headedness and constituent-priming given that the inflection that the second constituent carries determines the gender, number, and case of the compound? Our results show activation of individual constituents of compounds during priming, a strong word effect, and a positional advantage for first constituents in spite of the presence of second constituent heads.

This paper addresses issues of frequency and transparency in word recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in Developmentally Language Impaired (DLI) francophones. A simple visual lexical decision task probes responses of DLI and control participants when presented with verbs. DLI participants are sensitive to whole-word frequency and show little or no transparency effects. These results are interpreted as indicating that words are not organized according to “morphological families” in the DLI mental lexicon, but rather according to a principle of frequency. These facts support the hypothesis that words in the DLI mental lexicon lack lexical features and morphological structure.

This study explores the role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness in the on-line visual recognition of French and Bulgarian compounds using a constituent repetition priming paradigm. The results reported show significant constituent priming effects for both languages. Moreover, distinct priming patterns emerged, demonstrating that the semantic transparency of individual constituents, their position in the string, and morphological headedness interact in the processing of compounds.

The present study is a cross-linguistic investigation reporting on an on-line experimental task administered to 24 Greek-speaking and 10 Polish-speaking non-brain-damaged individuals. The questions under investigation were the following: What is the process of word recognition of complex words? What is the basic priming unit — root or word? What is the nature of mental representations? Is there an effect of morphological relatedness in the priming of complex words? and finally, what are the contents of the mental lexicon? A visual lexical decision task within a morphological priming paradigm was used, probing the subjects' word recognition of simple and of regularly and irregularly inflected verbs. The results obtained confirm the importance of morphemic relatedness in each of the two languages. They also point towards a significant language-specific effect with respect to the identification of the basic priming unit and the basic unit of representation. The present study challenges the claim for universality of certain linguistic and psycholinguistic proposals and has strong implications for the existing theories on the lexicon and mental representations.

The present study investigates the repetition, comprehension, and production abilities of three French-speaking agrammatic aphasics on stimuli that require attention to the inflectional markers of number, gender, and tense. Two sets of experiments were conducted within a Strong Lexicalist framework. The results suggest that morphological deficits can manifest themselves at distinct levels of grammar, the lexical and the postlexical. The internal morphological structure and idiosyncracies of lexical items were found to have an effect on aphasic performance. A proposal of a differentially organized lexical storage reflecting the particularities of the French verbal system is put forth. The storage hypothesis suggested for verbs is extended to other lexical items.

Semantic and syntactic contributions to processing of mass and count nouns were assessed by examining the performance of a patient suffering from a pure semantic deficit. Semantic and syntactic processing was evaluated on grammaticality judgement and sentence-picture matching tasks, respectively, where each task involved mass and count readings of metonymic nouns. While the patient did not show impaired performance on the grammaticality judgment task, he manifested difficulties in making mass/count distinctions in the sentence-picture matching task. It is thus argued that while distributionally the mass/count distinction may be established on a purely syntactic basis, cognitive processing of mass/count information requires both intact syntactic and semantic knowledge.

Universita` di Milano-Bicocca, ItalyAvailable online 29 July 2004IntroductionMass nouns like milk or salt usually refer to substances, whereascount nouns like dish or chair denote objects (Quine, 1960). This se-mantic difference between mass and count nouns also has a syntacticcounterpart(seeGillon,1992):massnounsinthesingularformcanonlybe modifiedby quantifiers that do not enumerate (e.g., some milk, muchsalt), whereas count nouns can be used with quantifiers that enumerate(e.g.,eachdish,onechair).Inviewofthefactthatmassandcountnounscan be differentiated either syntactically or semantically, it is of partic-ular interest to investigate semantic and syntacticprocessing in patientswithlanguagedifficultiesbycontrastingmassandcountnouns.Todate,neuropsychological findings on this distinction are still scarce (Gross-man, Mickanin, Onishi, & Hughes, 1995; Semenza, Mondini, & Mari-nelli, 1997; Vigliocco, Vison, Martin, & Garrett, 1999).Two studies are reported here conducted with Italian-speakingpatients with language disorders performing both a syntactic and asemantic task involving mass and count nouns. Study 1 describes theperformance of an aphasic patient (GA) and results are discussed andcompared to those of the aphasic patient described by Semenza et al.(1997). Study 2 reports multiple single-case data from Alzheimer’sdisease (AD) patients to investigate their ability to process mass/countsemantics and mass/count syntax, compared to their general syntacticand semantic capacities. If the mass/count distinction reflects the or-ganization of the lexical-semantic system, a differential performance onthe mass/count semantic and syntactic distinctions will be found.Materials and procedureThe experimental stimuli included 12 mass and 12 count nouns inthe singular form, matched for number of syllables and familiarity.Two experimental tasks were carried out: a semantic judgment taskand a syntactic judgment task. In both tasks a pair of four-wordsentences was presented. In the semantic task, patients had to select thesentence with the appropriate predicative adjective (e.g., This mouse isplentiful*/This mouse is big; The snow is abundant/The snow is large*).In this task, the right choice signals the ability to distinguish the ‘no-tional’ difference between objects and substances (i.e., count and massnouns). In the syntactic task, patients had to judge the correctness ofthe quantifier used in the sentence (e.g., He caught much mouse*/Hecaught one mouse; It fell some snow/It fell one snow*). This task impliesa syntactic judgment, i.e., the matching of a noun with a quantifier thatdoes or does not enumerate. In both tasks, the 24 pairs of experimentalmass/count stimuli were randomized and intermixed with 64 pairs offiller sentencesfeaturing other types of semantic or syntactic violations.ResultsThe performance of 12 controls, matched for age and educationwith the patients, provided the normative data (i.e., cut-off values).Study 1The aphasic patient (GA) showed deficits exclusively in the syn-tactic task (Table 1A). More specifically, he showed difficulties withfiller items, but his performance on mass/count syntactic items wasflawless. Moreover, he also showed an impaired performance in thesyntactic tasks of an external linguistic battery (Miceli, Laudanna,Burani, & Capasso, 1994). These results suggest that despite markedsyntactic difficulties GA was able to use the syntactic rules that un-derlie mass/count nouns.Study 2Three AD patients were tested with a two-month follow-up (Table1B). In the first assessment, patient SL showed semantic difficultieswith fillers only, but in the second assessment her semantic deficit alsoinvolved mass nouns. Patient FR first showed a deficit in processingmass-noun and filler sentences both semantically and syntactically,while preserving correct judgment on sentences involving count nouns.Two months later, the disorder also involved count nouns. In the firstevaluation, patient CF showed a selective difficulty with mass nounsin the semantic task only. She maintained the same profile in thefollow-up.DiscussionThese data corroborate the hypothesis of the specificity of mass/count noun rules and allowed to compare semantic and syntacticprocessing in aphasia and during the evolution of dementia.Brain and Language 91 (2004) 138–139www.elsevier.com/locate/b&l

The understanding of the nature and extent of morphological processing is critical to the overall investigation of how words are organized in the mind. In this overview article, we discuss the nature of morphological processing and the domain of morphological processing research. We claim that investigations crucially involve the understanding of relations among morphologically simple and morphologically complex words, and sketch how specific questions of morphological processing within the 2004 special issue on the mental lexicon fall under these categories. Finally, we discuss issues of construct, content and ecological validity within the field and what morphological processing can reveal about the association of form and meaning in the mind.

This study examines the processing of a specific linguistic distinction, the mass/count distinction, in patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Fourteen AD and 10 MCI subjects were tested using a sentence grammaticality judgement task where grammaticality violations were caused by determiner–noun mismatches, as well as a sentence–picture matching task to assess their ability to access mass and count readings of dual nouns. Considerable heterogeneity was observed within each subject group, and performance across groups was almost identical. It is concluded that a combination of linguistic and attentional and/or learning factors are responsible for the range of impairments; specifically, a subset of subjects exhibit no linguistic nor attentional/learning impairment, another subset exhibit only an attentional and/or learning impairment but no linguistic impairment, and a third subset (comprising more than half of the subjects included in this study) exhibit a linguistic impairment. It is postulated that the latter group have difficulty processing sense extensions in metonymous nouns. It is further claimed that, at least within the limits of the study, language impairments can be of the same severity and nature across AD and MCI subjects.

In this paper we investigated the effects of configurational asymmetry in prefixed verbs in French. We used a simple lexical decision paradigm to compare prefixed verbs with external and internal prefixes as specified in linguistic theory (Di Sciullo, 1997) where external prefixes do not change the aktionsart and the verb argument structure of the verb, but internal prefixes do change the aktionsart and may change the verb argument structure of the verb. In Experiment 1 we tested the bi-valent prefix de- where the configurational difference between external and internal properties of a prefix did not elicit differential response latencies. However, in Experiment 2, where unambiguous prefixes (internal en- and external re-) were tested, the external prefix elicited longer latencies. These results are discussed with respect to the linguistic constraints the configurational properties of prefixes place upon psycholinguistic models of lexical access, as well as with respect to the effects of prefix bi-valence in the recognition of prefixed verbs.

In the present study, we investigated the on-line recognition of gender-marked lexical items by three aphasic patients and eighteen matched control participants, all native speakers of Polish. Polish is unique in that it allows investigating grammatical gender across the major categories of nouns and verbs. Patients and their controls were tested using a simple visual lexical decision paradigm in which gender, number and grammatical category were manipulated. Results show that, while response latencies were markedly slower for aphasic patients, gender did not yield differential results in either grammatical category, for both patients and control participants. Plural forms, on the other hand, showed significantly slower response latencies than singular forms in both brain-damaged and unimpaired participants, but only for nouns. We interpret these findings in terms of the inherent vs. contextual, i.e. underspecified, nature of gender and number in the two grammatical categories. This study suggests that while gender can be impaired in off-line performance in aphasia, on-line recognition patterns parallel the performance of non-brain-damaged individuals, confirming the preservation of access procedures in automatic word recognition.

This research addresses the issues of frequency and regularity in auditory verb recognition and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in DLI francophones. A primed auditory lexical decision task probes reaction times and response accuracy in DLI and control participants on frequent and infrequent, and regular and irregular, inflected forms of verbs. Results show no priming for inflectionally related forms as well as strong frequency effects in DLI participants. These findings lend additional support to the hypothesis that developmental language impairment is a deficit in lexical representation.

This study investigates the processing of interfixed compounds within a primed lexical decision paradigm. Results from an experiment on German are compared with those from a previous study on Greek and Polish, demonstrating that patterns of morphological priming in German differ from those obtained in the other two languages. In all experiments compounds were primed by initial morphemes with and without the interfix. In Greek and Polish priming was significantly facilitated in cases where the mophological prime was homophonous with a real word. In German, however, the effect of wordness was found for un-interfixed but not for interfixed primes. Our data suggest that patterns of morphological priming for a given structure may not be generalizable to analogous structures in other languages without a consideration of language-specific morphological properties.

The present study investigates the relationship between morphological regularity and form during lexical processing using a visual priming paradigm varying the prime duration. We addressed the effect of regularity on morphological facilitation in nouns and verbs by exploiting particular characteristics of a highly inflected language, Greek, in which it is possible to manipulate morphological regularity while controlling the degree of orthographic overlap between morphological relatives. The effects of morphological regularity were found to crucially depend on the time course of lexical access. Moreover, morphological regularity was found to affect nouns and verbs differentially. We interpret these findings with respect to the distinction between affix processing and allomorph retrieval and discuss the issues of form overlap and orthographic boundaries in morphological processing.

This article presents an overview of current research on the mental lexicon, as it is represented by articles in the spring 2002 Special Issue of Brain and Language. We examine current findings in terms of language, task, and population effects associated with how words are presented and processed in the mind. We discuss how such mental representations may be linked to neurological instantiations and address the issue of ecological validity in the field. These discussions are organized in order to both provide an overview of the issues and to enable the reader to locate specific articles that bear on these issues. Finally, we present an organizational framework for the characterization of mental lexicon research within which challenges for advancement are isolated.

This study investigates the performance of two Italian nonfluent aphasic patients on nounadjective agreement in compounds and in noun phrases. A completion, a reading, and a repetition task were administered. Results show that both patients were able to correctly inflect adjectives within compounds, but not in noun phrases. Moreover, they were sensitive to constituent order (noun-adjective vs adjective-noun) within noun phrases, but less so within compounds, These results suggest differential processing for compounds as compared to noun phrases: While the latter require standard morphosyntactic operations that are often impaired in aphasic patients, the former can be accessed as whole words at the lexical level. () 2001 Elsevier Science (USA).

In opaque orthographies, such as English and French, three central dysgraphic syndromes have been described: surface dysgraphia, phonological dysgraphia, and deep dysgraphia. Writing breakdown patterns reveal that spelling can proceed by phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, or by a more direct or lexical approach. Ardila et al. (1989, 1991) claim that for Spanish speakers a lexical strategy for reading and writing is not an option due to the regularity of the orthography of this language. In this study we report two clear cases of dysgraphia in Spanish, one of surface dysgraphia and another of phonological dysgraphia, where a dissociation between lexical and sublexical writing can be observed, thus contradicting Ardila's position.

This study investigates the way in which phonological change during derivation influences the access of complex words in the on-line performance of English-speaking subjects during word recognition. Three visual lexical decision experiments were administered (cross-modal priming, visual priming and simple). Overall, the results showed that the forms which were subject to phonological change during derivation were always recognized significantly slower than those without phonological alterations. The results confirm the role of phonological change in accessing derived words. They also have important implications for a theory of lexical representation.

Working within the theoretical framework of prosodic nonconcatenative morphology developed by McCarthy (1975) for Semitic languages, we addressed, in the present paper, the issues of lexical representation, morphological relatedness, and modes of access in Algerian Arabic—a dialect of Standard Arabic—in an auditory morphological priming experiment. More specifically, we investigated the process of word recognition of singular and plural nouns in the performance of 24 non-brain-damaged subjects and 2 Algerian-speaking agrammatic aphasics. Plurals in Arabic involve either suffixation as in thesound plural(e.g., lbas “dress”/ lbas at “dresses”), or stem-internal changes as in thebroken plurals(e.g., k u rsi “chair”/ kr a s a “chairs”). Our findings reveal a differential processing of the two forms, indicating whole word access for broken plurals and decomposition into word and suffix for suffixed plurals. Further, the evidence suggests for Algerian Arabic an architecture of the lexicon reflecting a family-like organization which takes into account language-specific features.

The hypothesis that closed-class items which participate in theta-role assignment are less problematic in agrammatism than items which do not (Rizzi, 1985) is put to an empirical test. Five French-speaking agrammatic patients were tested in a sentence-picture matching paradigm to probe their comprehension of sentences containing articles, which are not involved in theta-role assignment, and of sentences containing pronouns, which in the direct object position are homophonous with articles and are theta-role assignees. Gender was used as a variable to differenciate between target and distracter. The data indicate that pronouns are significantly more difficult to process than articles. This result disconfirms the claim that the availability of grammatical information encoded in closed-class items is a function of their involvement in theta-role assignement. The present study demonstrates that the ability to process gender marked articles is generally well preserved in French-speaking agrammatic patients.

This paper presents the results of a study of active/passive sentence comprehension by a Polish-speaking agrammatic aphasic. The patient showed good performance on canonically ordered active and passive structures, but performed poorly on inverted variants. The systemtically normal and deviant comprehension patterns observed are accounted for by normal interpretative strategies applied to syntactic structures built around verbs with reduced inflectional morphology. The differences between our Polish data and the English data discussed in the literature are explained by the fact that Polish possesses a richer derivational verb morphology. The interpretation of inverted sentences demonstrates the importance of S-V-O word order preference. Our analysis draws upon the notion of grammatical functions to explain the data.