Second draft,22-09-03

We investigated the comprehension of pronouns and reflexives by children and agrammatic aphasics in a cross-linguistic study of Dutch, Spanish and Italian. We compared the interpretation of these elements in transitive and Exceptional Case Marking constructions to be able to distinguish between three important theories on Binding: Government and Binding (Chomsky, 1981), Reflexivity (1993) and Primitives of Binding (2001). The results are in favor of a theory that distinguishes between the interpretation of pronouns in transitive and ECM structures, such as Reflexivity or Primitives of Binding. We propose that a natural explanation follows from Primitives of Binding, combining the notion of economy with the claim that children and agrammatic aphasics have a limited amount of processing resources available for performing syntactic operations. Thus, the economy hierarchy for reference establishment is different resulting in problems with interpretation of pronouns in ECM sentences.