Morphological Processing in Italian Agrammatic Speakers: Eight Experiments in Lexical Morphology

Abstract

Agrammatic speech production has often been characterized as amorphology. This study of two Italian agrammatic patients shows that, with respect toinflectional morphology of simple and derived nouns,the morphological features of gender and number are almost fully preserved for one patient (MG) and only mildly disturbed in the other patient (DR). Like inflection, the use ofderivational suffixationas a means of word-building is only mildly disturbed in both patients. However, they show a severe disturbance with respect toinflectional morphology of lexical compounds,which requires syntactic analysis at the word level. Moreover, they are severely impaired in thechoice of the function word for the construction of prepositional compounds,syntactically generated phrases which have the status of a word. Apart from such syntax-dependent morphological and word-building operations, neither inflectional nor derivational morphology are seriously disturbed in our patients. The apparent amorphology in their spontaneous speech can thus not be explained by a disorder of morphological representations in the lexicon system per se. In another study (De Bleser and Luzzatti, 1994) we were able to show that the patients had severe problems with the implementation of morphology in specific syntactic contexts, thus pointing to a problem in morphosyntactic rather than morpholexical processing as a factor contributing to agrammatic speech production.