Gender and Case in Agrammatic Production

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 wordsor 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 Brocaʹs aphasia, one may wonder whether gender and/or case information plays a role here. e present study, article production of nine Dutch and ten German individuals with agrammatic Brocaʹs 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 syntacticprocessing.