Purpose To evaluate processing and comprehension of pronouns and reflexives in individuals with agrammatic (Broca's) aphasia and age-matched control participants. Specifically, we evaluate processing and comprehension patterns in terms of a specific hypothesis -- the Intervener Hypothesis - that posits that the difficulty of individuals with agrammatic (Broca's) aphasia results from similarity-based interference caused by the presence of an intervening NP between two elements of a dependency chain. Methods We used an eye tracking-while-listening paradigm to investigate real-time processing (Experiment 1) and a sentence-picture matching task to investigate final interpretive comprehension (Experiment 2) of sentences containing proforms in complement phrase and subject relative constructions. Results Individuals with agrammatic aphasia demonstrated a greater proportion of gazes to the correct referent of reflexives relative to pronouns and significantly greater comprehension accuracy of reflexives relative to pronouns. Conclusions These results provide support for the Intervener Hypothesis, previous support for which comes from studies of Wh- questions and unaccusative verbs, and we argue that this account provides an explanation for the deficits of individuals with agrammatic aphasia across a growing set of sentence constructions. The current study extends this hypothesis beyond filler-gap dependencies to referential dependencies and allows us to refine the hypothesis in terms of the structural constraints that meet the description of the Intervener Hypothesis.

中文翻译：

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语法性失语症个体的形式-先行联系：干预者假设的检验

目的 评估语法（布罗卡）失语症患者和年龄匹配的对照参与者对代词和反身词的处理和理解。具体来说，我们根据特定假设（干预者假设）评估处理和理解模式，该假设假设患有语法（布罗卡）失语症的个体的困难是由于两个元素之间存在干预 NP 引起的基于相似性的干扰的依赖链。方法 我们使用边听边的眼动追踪范式来研究实时处理（实验 1）和句子图片匹配任务来研究包含补语和主语相关结构形式的句子的最终解释理解（实验 2）。结果 有语法性失语症的个体表现出更大比例的凝视相对于代词的反身的正确所指对象以及相对于代词的反身的理解准确度显着更高。结论 这些结果为干预者假设提供了支持，之前的支持来自对 Wh 问题和非宾格动词的研究，我们认为该解释为语法性失语症患者在越来越多的句子结构中的缺陷提供了解释。目前的研究将这一假设从填充间隙依赖扩展到参考依赖，并允许我们根据满足干预假设描述的结构约束来改进假设。