The syntax of single words: Evidence from a patient with a selective function word reading deficit

Abstract

We describe the reading performance of a patient who has selective deficits for reading nonwords, function words, and morphologically complex words in isolation. His reading of highly abstract nouns and verbs, however, is relatively well preserved. He can recognise and comprehend the meaning of written function words, of derivational morphology, and of most inflectional morphology. We suggest that his deficit in reading grammatical morphemes is unrelated to his problems in reading nonwords and cannot be explained by their low semanticity and imageability. The patient's speech is ungrammatical but is not devoid of grammatical morphemes and his reading of functional elements improves when these are presented within the context of sentences. We argue that syntactic information relevant to individual lexical items including information about how the word may potentially be used within a phrase must be accessed during single word reading tasks (e.g., Levelt, 1989). This is particularly difficult for function words due to their linguistic specification, which is different from that of lexical categories (Chomsky, 1995). Both linguistic theory and Garrett's (e.g., 1982) model of sentence processing account for the patient's improved reading of function words in the context of sentences.