Eleonora Binacci

The present study investigates the comprehension of different types of Clitic Left Dislocation (i.e., ClLD) structures by Italian-speaking agrammatic aphasics. The aim is to verify whether variations in comprehension performance can be explained under the \textit{featural Relativized Minimality} (i.e., fRM) approach (Starke (2001); Rizzi (2004)). More specifically, the study seeks to determine if the presence of an a-marked topic (i.e., a-Topic) in ClLD structures with pre-verbal lexical subjects leads to improved comprehension compared to structures with not a-marked topics (i.e., Simple Topics), as previously observed in children (Belletti & Manetti (2019); \cite{manettichildren}), due to the presence of a syntactic feature associated with preposition ‘a’ (i.e., ‘affected/empathic’ feature; Belletti (2022) for overview). Five Italian-speaking agrammatic aphasics and a control group of healthy adults participated in the experiment, which consisted of a picture-matching task designed as a 2AFC. The experimental results aligned with expectations, showing that ClLDs with lexical pre-verbal subjects and a-Topics are better preserved in agrammatic aphasia compared to those with Simple Topics, suggesting thus preposition ‘a’ to play a distinctive role beyond its functional status as a light preposition in Italian.

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Authors:
Binacci, Eleonora (University of Siena)