Why Is “Red Cross” Different from “Yellow Cross”?: A Neuropsychological Study of Noun–Adjective Agreement within Italian Compounds

Abstract

This study investigates the performance of two Italian nonfluent aphasic patients on noun–adjective agreement in compounds and in noun phrases. A completion, a reading, and a repetition task were administered. Results show that both patients were able to correctly inflect adjectives within compounds, but not in noun phrases. Moreover, they were sensitive to constituent order (noun–adjective vs adjective–noun) within noun phrases, but less so within compounds. These results suggest differential processing for compounds as compared to noun phrases: While the latter require standard morphosyntactic operations that are often impaired in aphasic patients, the former can be accessed as whole words at the lexical level.