Comprehension of three-argument clitic left dislocations in Catalan Broca's aphasia

People with Broca's aphasia have difficulty understanding certain syntactic structures, but the cause remains debated. This study investigates the comprehension of clitic left dislocations with three thematic roles in Catalan, compared to declaratives (with and without indirect object clitics) and subject topicalisations. These understudied structures are useful for testing the hypothesis that comprehension deficits result from intervention effects due to processing deficits. We conducted a sentence-picture matching task with eight individuals with Broca's aphasia and eight matched controls. Results showed that while the comprehension of clitic left dislocations was impaired, participants performed well on indirect object clitics, declaratives, and subject topicalisations. Notably, a subgroup showed above-chance performance on dislocations with preverbal subjects but not postverbal subjects, challenging intervention-based accounts and highlighting the potential role of locality and agreement operations in supporting comprehension.