Clitic pronouns comprehension in Spanish: a study in people with aphasia

A number of studies characterizing the performance of people with agrammatic aphasia (PWAA) have identified difficulties in understanding sentences in non-canonical order and detected problems in interpreting function words. Although some of these studies reported problems in interpreting objective pronouns, the pattern of performance is not clear and there is no consensus regarding what might be causing the difficulties. This work focused on the processing of sentences with cliticized object pronouns in Rioplatense Spanish. A sentence-picture matching test was designed in which the sentence order (canonical and non-canonical), the pronominalization of the direct object, and its position were manipulated. 5 PWAAs and a group of 10 healthy control subjects (CG) participated in the study. Under all conditions, GC performed significantly better than PWAA. Furthermore, both groups performed better with the sentences in canonical order than those in non-canonical order. Finally, no main effect of direct object pronominalization was observed. However, an effect did emerge when non-canonical sentences were particularly analyzed: PWAA performed better in sentences with clitic pronouns than when the object was a full nominal. The preservation of cliticized pronouns, regardless its position, in conjunction with this apparently unexpected pattern in non-canonical sentences, defies representational explanations and seems to fit better processing accounts of agrammatic deficits.