Cartography and agrammatic syntactic production in Ibero-Romance

Friedmann’s work has shown that the syntactic productions of Broca’s aphasics are much more selectively impaired than previously thought. Here we entertain the Tree Pruning Hypothesis of Friedmann and evaluate its predictions in Catalan, Galician and Spanish, under the assumption that the functional structure of the tree is that postulated by the cartographic approach. We report the results of tests on the production of sentential negation, tense and subject agreement, clitic production, question production, and relative clause production, run with fifteen agrammatic patients. Overall, the results are consistent with the Tree Pruning Hypothesis for all subjects of all these languages. Further, on the basis of various tense and aspect projections, which are all equally impaired, we conclude that there are no distinguishable levels of impairment within a field. The analysis of question production provides an argument for the merge of why questions and yes/no interrogatives in the same functional projection.