“…English speaking AD patients are reported to overuse pronouns instead of full Noun Phrases (NPs) (Almor, Kempler, MacDonald, Andersen, & Tyler, 1999;Bschor, Kühl, & Reischies, 2001;Kempler & Zelinski, 1994;Nebes, 1989;Ripich & Terrell, 1988), but no consensus exists as to why they do so. Explanations range from locating the deficit in central language processes, either related to working memory (Almor et al, 1999), or impoverished lexical-semantic representations (Altmann, Kempler, & Andersen, 2001;Forbes, Venneri, & Shanks, 2002;Venneri et al, 2008), to attributing this pattern to problems with discourse-pragmatics (Ripich & Terrell, 1988;Ulatowska & Chapman, 1995). In this paper, however, we do not address the nature of the cognitive deficit(s) underlying the lexical problems with NPs in AD.…”