Agrammatic production of subject-verb agreement: the effect of conceptual number

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that the deficit underlying agrammatic sentence production difficulties can be characterized as a limitation of computational resources and that these resources are not restricted to syntactic processing. This hypothesis was tested by eliciting subject-verb agreement errors in a sentence fragment completion paradigm. Sentence fragments were complex noun phrases, containing a subject (head) noun and a modifying prepositional phrase, containing a "local" noun. We varied the number of "tokens" a singular head noun referred to. Therefore, in one condition, grammatical and conceptual number of the head noun mismatched, whereas these numbers were the same in another condition. In Experiments 1 and 2, we observed an effect of this variable (i.e., more agreement errors when conceptual number was plural and grammatical number singular) in normal controls. Broca's aphasics, on the other hand, showed no effect. Experiment 3 consisted of a sentence/picture matching test. This test showed that the lack of effect with Broca's aphasics cannot be attributed to a comprehension deficit. We argue that these results are incompatible with the notion of a limitation in resources specific for syntactic processing. Instead, we interpret this as the result of a trade-off: Broca's aphasics lack computational resources to take into account both grammatical and conceptual information in morphosyntactic processing and rely on grammatical information only.