The processing of inflected and derived words in writing

ABSTRACT

We report on an English-speaking, aphasic individual (RB) with a spelling deficit more severely affecting orthographically irregular words for which phonologically plausible errors (PPEs) were produced. PPEs were observed for all word forms, with the exception of inflectional suffixes, despite the irregular sound-print mappings of many inflectional suffixes (e.g., walked → /wɔkt/). RB's pattern replicates that reported in Badecker, Rapp, and Caramazza (Badecker, W., Rapp, B., & Caramazza, A. (1996). Lexical Morphology and the Two Orthographic Routes. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13, 161–176). We extended their investigation by examining RB's spelling of derived words and found a selective deficit for derived words compared to inflected words in writing. This selective deficit did not appear to reflect differences in morphological transparency or suffix frequencies that exist between inflection and derivation. This is the first evidence that distinct neural mechanisms support inflection and derivation in spelling.

KEYWORDS:

• Morphology
• inflection
• derivation
• orthography
• dysgraphia

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to RB and his wife for their enthusiastic and dedicated participation in the project. We wish to thank Bernadine Gagnon, Adam Buchwald, and Stacey Rimikis for their valuable suggestions, and Dakota Egglefield and Jessie Beshara for their assistance with conducting the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This may also be the case for derived words. Although we did not extensively test gemination with derived words, the finding of correct letter doubling with only 2/10 derived words indicates a rather pervasive problem with gemination required by suffixation.