The production of grammatical and lexical determiners in Broca's aphasia Determiner production is a testing ground for theories of Broca's aphasia and agrammatic speech. On one type of theory, determiner production is impaired in so far as determiners are grammatical items. On another type of theory, determiner production is impaired because determiners depend on verbs for case-assignment. These two types of theories are mutually compatible, but in recent years, research on determiner production has focused on the second type. In order to test the first type, an experiment was carried out which contrasted the production of Danish grammatical determiners (indefinite articles) and lexical ones (numerals) in 5 speakers diagnosed with Broca's aphasia and 4 nonbrain-damaged controls. The results strongly support the first type of theories: 1) in agrammatic speech, only grammatical determiners were omitted to an extent which differs from omission rates in the speech of the controls; 2) substitutions of grammatical agreement markers were found only in agrammatic speech.

This paper summarizes recent experiments examining the production of grammatical and lexical determiners in healthy individuals and individuals with agrammatic aphasia. The experiments discussed employ a design in which the Danish grammatical indefinite article en/et is contrasted with the lexical numeral en/et. The results show that articles are harder to produce than numerals. In agrammatic speech the difference is reflected in a higher proportion of omissions of articles. In healthy speech the difference is reflected in increased response times and decreased accurary rates for articles. The results are interpreted in light of a usage-based and functional theory of grammar, in which grammatical items are defined as signs that are by convention discursively secondary and structurally dependent.