This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory -- the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT) -- has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is

this paper. We thank Michal Biran, Mali Gil, Aviah Gvion, and Dafna Wenkert-Olenik for their help in discussions and testing, and the participants for their patient participation. Address correspondence to Naama Friedmann, School of Education, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. E-mail: naamafr@post.tau.ac.il, http://www.tau.ac.il/~naamafr

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this article may be addressed to Alfonso Caramazza, Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, William James Hall, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail: caram@wjh.harvard.edu

This study explored the way Russian speakers with agrammatism understand and repeat movement-derived sentences, and examined whether they use morpho-syntactic cues to assist comprehension. The comprehension of three Russian-speaking individuals with agrammatism was tested, and their performance was compared to 15 matched control participants. In addition, the repetition ability of one of the participants was assessed. The study included topicalization structures, relative clauses, and SVO sentences. The individuals with agrammatism performed at chance level on topicalization structures and object relative clauses, whereas their comprehension of SVO sentences and subject relatives was significantly better and above chance. Their comprehension of topicalization structures was poor although all sentences included morphological cues of case marking on the topicalized object and on the subject. Case and gender morphology on the relative pronoun did not lead to better comprehension of object relative clauses compared to relative clauses in which gender inflection could not be used as a cue for interpretation. The repetition task indicated a considerable difficulty in repetition of sentences that include syntactic movement to high nodes of the syntactic tree.