Overcoming discourse-linking difficulties in aphasia: The case of clitic pronouns

ABSTRACT

The present study aims to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the impact of discourse-linking deficits on the performance of individuals with aphasia by providing new data from a set of rarely investigated constructions: sentences in which a clitic pronoun coexists alongside with the full DP it agrees with. To do so, we use data of individuals with non-fluent aphasias who need to overcome the difficulties in direct object (accusative) clitic production. This results in overproduction of non-target clitic right dislocations (RDs) and clitic doubling (CD). Data from 15 individual’s native speakers of Spanish and Catalan are discussed. Data complement the results of previous investigations on discourse-linking effects in these languages, allowing the interpretation of results across constructions.

KEYWORDS:

• Clitic pronouns
• discourse
• aphasia
• Spanish
• Catalan

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Funding

The first author acknowledges support from the programme project (University of Copenhagen) as well as projects FFI2015-68589-C2-1-P & FFI2014-61888-EXP (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain). The second author acknowledges funding from the research grant from El Bosque University to the projects 2012-302 and 2012-348.

Notes

¹ Catalan and European Spanish version: J. Elías, modified by M. I. Gómez-Ruiz.

² Note however that, contrary to direct object clitics, reflexive anaphors are morphologically marked so that their interpretation could be salient due to lexical/morphological information (Reinhart & Reuland, 1993). The contrast between clitic and strong pronouns could shed light at this respect. We thank one of the reviewers for the comments on this issue.

³ Eight further cases of wrong clitic pronoun selection were found in the sample of 5 Galician speaking individuals with agrammatism studied in Martínez-Ferreiro (2010).

⁴ Nine additional errors were also reported in control conditions not including clitic pronouns.

Additional information

Funding

The first author acknowledges support from the programme project (University of Copenhagen) as well as projects FFI2015-68589-C2-1-P & FFI2014-61888-EXP (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain). The second author acknowledges funding from the research grant from El Bosque University to the projects 2012-302 and 2012-348.