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Background: Derived words have constituted an important bridge between aphasiology and psycholinguistics by addressing the extent to which morphology affects representation and processing in the mind/brain.Aims: Our goal was to assess how properties of whole words and their overlapping substrings affect the manner in which English derivationally suffixed words are recognised and produced.Methods & Procedures: We probed the processing of multimorphemic words containing strings of two derivational suffixes by healthy adult participants, employing both a progressive demasking naming task and a typing task. The progressive demasking paradigm that we employed integrates word recognition and production by requiring that a participant recognises a progressively demasked stimulus and then say it as quickly as possible. The typing task allowed us to focus on segment by segment aspects of processing during production by enabling us to construct per-letter typing times for each region of a word.Outcomes & Re...

Background: Few studies have investigated how individuals diagnosed with post-stroke Broca’s aphasia decompose words into their constituent morphemes in real-time processing. Previous research has focused on morphologically complex words in non-time-constrained settings or in syntactic frames, but not in the lexicon.Aims: We examined real-time processing of morphologically complex words in a group of five Greek-speaking individuals with Broca’s aphasia to determine: (1) whether their morphological decomposition mechanisms are sensitive to lexical (orthography and frequency) vs. morphological (stem-suffix combinatory features) factors during visual word recognition, (2) whether these mechanisms are different in inflected vs. derived forms during lexical access, and (3) whether there is a preferred unit of lexical access (syllables vs. morphemes) for inflected vs. derived forms.Methods & Procedures: The study included two real-time experiments. The first was a semantic judgment task necessitating participan...

Background: While converging evidence has led to the view that people with aphasia exploit compositional procedures when producing compound words, the issue of what compound‐internal characteristics are at play during these procedures is still under debate. It has been argued that constituent position and/or morphosyntactic prominence, i.e., being the head constituent of a compound, may influence the manner in which compounds are accessed. However, findings obtained from patient performances are thus far inconclusive, because positional and headedness effects are frequently confounded in a language. Aims: In order to disentangle position‐in‐the‐string and headedness effects in compound production in aphasia, the main objective of this study is to investigate the performance of bilingual patients speaking languages in which these effects can be teased apart. Our secondary goal is to probe the roles of grammatical category (adjectives vs nouns) and of between‐language phonological similarity, as both these ...

The most salient and discussed features of agrammatism are the omission and substitution of grammatical morphemes, whether bound or free, in speech production. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that language-specific features determine the pattern of omissions and substitutions found; morphological markers are almost never omitted if the resulting form is a non-word; substitutions are mis-selections from existing paradigms. In the present paper we investigate the ways in which agrammatism is manifested in Algerian Arabic, a Semitic language where simple (O-prefixed and O-suffixed) words are described as consisting of three morphemes: the discontinuous consonantal root, the discontinuous vocalic base and a CV template or skeleton (McCarthy 1975). Our findings are comparable to those previously reported, in that the three agrammatic subjects who participated in this study do omit and substitute free-standing and bound grammatical markers, and never produce non-words. More specifically, their perf...

This paper reports a cross-linguistic study of noun phrase production by agrammatic aphasic speakers of Swedish, French, German, Polish, and English. The subjects were given comparable tests of contrastive naming for the different languages. The study demonstrates problems in noun phrase production, especially in structurally complex noun phrases, indicating increasing problems caused by an increasing processing load. The study further demonstrates great difficulties in the production of double adjectives in noun phrases. Recurring patterns found among the eleven agrammatic patients were: word order deviation (especially noun first), singular for plural (or singular first), use of quantifiers, production of some complex NP structures, and substitutions of grammatical markers, leading to agreement errors in complex NP structures. The findings are discussed in relation to possible strategies such as fragmentation of the noun phrase and/or use of topic-comment structure, as well as attempts to produ...

In the light of continuing disagreement as to the nature of agrammatisrn in Broca's aphasia, the purpose of the present investigation was to probe further into this syndrome in a case study of a Polish-speaking agrammatic aphasic with left-hemisphere damage of cerebro-vascular origin. The patient's production, comprehension and grammatical judgement abilities were investigated in a variety of tasks. Supplementary information (writing, reading, repeating and naming) was also elicited. Results do not warrant a production versus comprehension dichotomy, but the patient's performances exhibited a clear dissociation between marked syntactic and mild morphological disruptions. Performance patterns across tasks showed that at least some aspects of syntax and semantics were exploited and that normal computational heuristics, as well as compensatory strategies, were applied.