SPANISH CLITIC PRONOUNS: A STUDY IN PEOPLE WITH APHASIA DURING COMPREHENSION

MARÍA ELINA SÁNCHEZ; JAICHENCO, VIRGINIA; FUCHS, MARTÍN; SEVILLA, YAMILA

Filadelfia

Conferencia; Academy of Aphasia; 2022

IntroductionA number of studies characterizing the performance of people with agrammatic aphasia (PWAA) have identified difficulties in understanding sentences in non-canonical order and problems in interpreting function words (Caramazza & Zurif, 1976). 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 (Arslan, Devers, & Martínez-Ferreiro, 202; Luzzatti et al., 2001). This work focused on the processing of sentences with cliticized object pronouns in Rioplatense Spanish. MethodsParticipants. 5 PWAAs and a group of 10 healthy control subjects (CG) participated in the study.Task and Procedure. A sentence-picture matching in which a sentence was said aloud and the participant had to choose between two pictures.Materials. The stimuli consisted of semantically reversible sentences in which the gender and number of nouns in noun phrases (masculine and singular) were controlled. In addition, the following variables were manipulated: 1) Sentence order: canonical order (C), subject-verb-object/SVO, and non-canonical order (NC), OVS; 2) Presence or absence of the pronominalization of the object: the direct object of the sentence was pronominalized, so sentences with a pronoun (P) and without a pronoun (SP) were created; 3) Position of the clitic pronoun: in the sentences with a pronoun, the superficial position of the clitic object was varied: preverbal (pV) vs. in situ (insitu) vs. in raising position (a). The design included 10 experimental conditions (See Table 1).ResultsUnder 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.Conclusions Some previous studies had shown that PCAA had problems in the interpretation of objective pronouns in sentences, and in particular with cliticized pronouns. In contrast, under controlled conditions, our study did not verify major difficulties in the interpretation of pronominalized object forms. This finding coincides with that reported in another study, at least as regards the interpretation of objective clitic pronouns in simple sentences (Baauw & Cuetos, 2003). According to our data, the presence of the pronominalized form of the object may even result in an advantage for the interpretation of sentences in non-canonical order, in which the interpretation could be affected by interference. These results suggest that the difficulties recorded in previous investigations should be interpreted less from the specific study of these elements or from the syntactic properties necessary to process the configurations in which they are involved, than in relation to a reduction of processing capacity. This limitation could also explain the difficulties observed in interpreting the sentences in non-canonical order.