ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the unfolding of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) from its inception in the early 1980s to the first decade of the twenty-first century. Bold and controversial claims were made, stimulating debates were conducted. Despite many points of criticism, trace deletion and movement are firmly engraved on the consciousness of most workers in the field as the antecedents of asyntactic comprehension of agrammatic patients: they were either accepted or rejected, but never ignored. Problems remain however: the theory was unable to explain variable performance on active sentences, where guessing responses are not expected. It did not even attempt to explain syntactic comprehension problems in free word order case-assigning languages. The main point of Caramazza's critique is that it is not the number of participants, but the number of trials attempted that matter in determining confidence in the results. Caramazza re-analysed the data in Grodzinsky, using a patient-by-patient statistical analysis, with strikingly different results.
