Who owns what? Comprehension of gender information in German possessive pronouns and determiners in aphasia.

Abstract

Cross-linguistic studies have demonstrated that people with (agrammatic) aphasia often exhibit difficulties in pronoun comprehension, but the role of gender marking has been largely overlooked and prior research has concentrated on only certain pronoun types. This study focused on gender cues in an understudied pronoun type, possessives, in German. German possessive determiners (e.g., seinmasc-efemGabelfem 'his fork') and possessive pronouns (e.g., ihrfem-efem 'hers') comprise two distinct gender cues, with a stem and a suffix providing information about who (possessor) is possessing what (possessee object), respectively. Twelve individuals with a variety of post-stroke aphasia classifications and 31 language-unimpaired controls completed a phrase-picture matching task with parallel eye-tracking requiring identification of the object that was congruent with the possessive form for possessor and possessee gender from an array of four. The off-line accuracy data revealed that the control group performed at ceiling, whereas all participants with aphasia showed difficulty identifying the correct possessee objects. Moreover, a subgroup of participants with aphasia also exhibited impairments in possessor identification. These distinct processing patterns were supported by the on-line eye fixation data. However, the two patterns were not associated with the type of aphasia. We place these findings in the context of previous research on pronoun processing and theoretical accounts of deficits in syntactic comprehension in aphasia. Moreover, we propose possible underlying processing impairments, including differences in the processing of grammatical and semantic gender, and implications for both clinical practice and research.