Language Processing in Individuals with Non-fluent Aphasia: Evidence from Root and Synthetic Compound Nouns

Abstract

Background: Neurolinguists are increasingly inclined to study the language behavior of patients with aphasia (PWAs) to discover more about the relationship between the brain and language. Objectives: This study investigated the production of synthetic and root compound nouns in the PWAs to discover how these lexemes were processed. Methods: Using a confrontation naming task, four PWAs (two patients with Broca aphasia and two patients with transcortical motor aphasia) named 80 random black and white drawings of simple and compound nouns. They also repeated the nouns through an auditory repetition task. Compound nouns were of two root and synthetic types. Root nouns belonged to the noun-noun, and synthetic compounds belonged to the noun-verb category. Results: There was a significant difference between the affected components in naming and repetition of compound nouns. Moreover, there was a significant difference between naming and repetition of simple and compound nouns. There was no significant difference between naming and repetition of root and synthetic nouns. Conclusions: PWAs process compound nouns through the dual-route model. They cannot retrieve the phonological forms of compound nouns, but they retain their knowledge of word-formation, indicating the modularity of linguistic ability. Morphological structure plays a role in word processing.