This study examines agrammatic comprehension of object-subject-verb (OSV) and object-verb-subject (OVS) structures in Hebrew. These structures are syntactically identical to the basic order subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence except for the movement of the object to the beginning of the sentence, and thus enable empirical examination of syntactic movement in agrammatic comprehension. Seven individuals with agrammatism, 7 individuals with conduction aphasia, and 7 individuals without language impairment, all native speakers of Hebrew, performed a sentence-picture matching task. The task compared OSV and OVS sentences to SVO sentences and to subject and object relatives. Individuals with agrammatism performed more poorly than those in either of the other groups. Their comprehension of SVO sentences was significantly above chance, but comprehension of OSV and OVS sentences was at chance and was poorer than comprehension of SVO sentences. These results show that agrammatic comprehension of structures that involve movement of a noun phrase is impaired even when the structure is a simple active sentence, in line with the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH; Y. Grodzinsky, 1990, 1995a, 2000). A modification is suggested to accommodate the TDH with the VP Internal Subject Hypothesis, according to which individuals with agrammatism use an" Avoid Movement" strategy in comprehension.

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia suffer from a deficit with regard to sentence comprehension that has been found to be selective. They understand simple active sentences, subject relatives, subject clefts, and subject questions, but they fail to understand reversible verbal passives, object relatives, object clefts, and object questions (Caramazza & Zurif, 1976; Grodzinsky, 1989, 2000; Schwartz, Saffran, & Marin, 1980; see Grodzinsky, Pinañgo, Zurif, & Drai, 1999, for a review). The question of what these structures have in common that makes them hard for agrammatic comprehension and what distinguishes them from the structures that are comprehended correctly has intrigued many researchers over the years, and several accounts that are different in nature have been suggested. Some accounts, like the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH; Grodzinsky, 1990, 1995a, 2000), propose a selective syntactic deficit; other accounts contend that agrammatism entails a complete loss of syntax and that sentence comprehension is achieved by linear assignment of roles (Caplan, 1983; Caplan & Futter, 1986); yet other researchers (eg, Caplan, Baker, & Dehaut, 1985; Miyake, Carpenter, & Just, 1994) ascribe the deficit to capacity limitations and base their accounts on nonsyntactic complexity matrices.