Lexical deformations are sensitive to morphosyntactic factors in posterior aphasia

Abstract

Abstract The linguistic output of a subgroup of posterior aphasics, the paragrammatics, has been as a rule defined with such notions as language with deviant lexicon but with undisturbed syntax. However, the dualistic, clear-cut juxtaposition of these paragrammatic speakers with agrammatic aphasics has been recently received with some doubt. We analysed over 100 paraphasic words in the spontaneous speech of a paragrammatic speaker of a highly inflected language (Finnish). The fact that the paraphasias appeared more often in the syntactically derived, i.e. inflected, words than in the lexical ones suggests that morphosyntactic factors may interfere with word processing in posterior aphasia.