Do people with agrammatic aphasia understand verb movement ?

Background: Many studies report that the comprehension of sentences derived by movement of phrases is impaired in agrammatism. However, only few studies have explored the comprehension of sentences that involve a movement of the verb. In several languages, the verb can or should move to the second position of a sentence, creating VSO sentences like ‘‘Yesterday ate the girl a watermelon’’ from an SVO sentence. Previous studies of comprehension of verb movement either allowed the patients to use a strategy, or used grammaticality judgement tasks, which probably tap different abilities from interpretation tasks. Aims: The present study tested the comprehension of sentences with verb movement to second position in agrammatism using a novel sentence type that prevented participants from employing strategy-based comprehension. Comprehension was tested using sentences with verb–noun homophones and homographs. In general, the choice between the noun and the verb meaning of homophones and homographs relies on the construction of the syntactic structure of the sentence, and the syntactic role of the ambiguous word. In the current study, we used sentences in which the ambiguous word was placed at the object position, such as ‘‘Yesterday caught the bat flies in the garden’’ (literally transcribed into English). In order to understand whether it is a verb or a noun (whether the bat in this sentence flies, or whether it catches flies), comprehension of the relation between the moved verb and its object is required. Thus, these sentences might shed light on whether individuals with agrammatism can understand verb movement.