A morphological processing deficit in verbs but not in nouns: a case study in a highly inflected language

Abstract

In this paper we describe a non-fluent aphasic patient who presents a selective impairment in the inflectional morphology of verbs but not of nouns in a highly inflected language, Greek. Furthermore, the patient's impairment was observed in production, but not in comprehension. More specifically, the patient manifested a selective deficit in the production of past-tense forms that do not involve computation of the rule-based aspectual marker. The patient's deficit pattern indicates that morphological processes have to be considered in relation to grammatical class in models of lexical processing.