Il ruolo del tratto di numero nella comprensione delle frasi relative oggetto in pazienti afasici italiani

This study investigates the role of number features in the agrammatic comprehension of object relative clauses with preverbal subjects. A sentence-picture matching task was used to assess the performance of four Italian aphasic patients. Results show that the mismatch condition of number features (with the subject singular/plural and the object plural/singular) is computationally the most complex one. In this condition, aphasic patients have greatest difficulties in establishing the right set of syntactic relations among the constituents of the sentence.