Agrammatism in Spanish: a case study.

This article presents a case study of a Spanish-speaking Broca's patient with a selective deficit in syntactic production. The analysis indicates difficulties in processing certain abstract categories such as clitic pronouns without any other significant morphological errors. This pattern and the abundant use of strong pronouns in subject position are accounted as a syntactic production deficit related to the computation of phonetically null elements e that enter in a syntactic chain. At the same time, the patient shows a milder problem in the production of canonical word order at the sentence level, which is also explained in syntactic terms.