Comprehension of wh-questions in agrammatism: a single-case study

Unlike comprehension of declarative sentences, comprehension of wh-questions in agrammatic aphasia is a neglected research topic. Not all whquestions are understood equally well yet the nature of this difficulty has received sparse attention in the literature. According to one view (Avrutin 2000), which follows Pesetsky's (1987) well-known distinction of whquestions, questions beginning with which prevent people with agrammatic aphasia from establishing a link with a discourse related presupposed referent. This applies only when the wh-phrase moves from the object position. Our aim was to investigate Avrutin's hypothesis in a range of wh-questions via a single-case study. Different types of wh-questions in canonical and noncanonical word order were tested in an act-out task. Patient HT is able to understand canonical wh-questions but not non-canonical ones. We argue that the selective deficit of wh-questions in agrammatic aphasia is best accounted for at the level of the sentence rather than discourse factors. We also argue that Pesetsky's distinction is unsatisfactory regarding our data.