Is covert A’- movement available in agrammatic Broca’s aphasia? Evidence from scope ambiguity.

Patients with agrammatic aphasia are impaired in comprehending constructions that contain displaced constituents, such aswh-questions, object relatives, object clefts and passives. This is probably due to complexity of processing sentences that involve overt movement operations. If syntactic movement yields comprehension impairments, the question arises whether this also holds for covert movement. The aim of this study is to investigate whether Greek-speaking agrammatic patients are impaired in processing ambiguous doubly quantified sentences, which – according to the standard theory (May, 1977) – involve covert A’-movement on their inverse scope interpretation. Anexample of an ambiguous sentence is presented in (1a), with its twopossible Logical Form representations in (1b,c). The first interpretation, represented by (1b), is that there exists a single man who waters all the flowers in the relevant domain. On this interpretation, the existential takes scope over the universal (surface-scope interpretation). The second interpretation, represented by (1c), is that some different man waters each flower. On this interpretation, the universal takes scope over the existential (inverse-scope interpretation).