Morphological processing of polymorphemic nouns in a highly inflecting language

Abstract

We explored the processing of morphologically complex nouns in an aphasic who is a native speaker of Finnish, a language with rich morphology. This patient made numerous morphological errors with inflected nouns in oral reading, repetition, and word elicitation. In contrast, reading and repetition of both base form and derived nouns was significantly better. The cross-modal nature of his morphological difficulties together with other experimental evidence for a semantic impairment indicated that a central deficit played a significant role in his problems with inflected nouns. This suggests a difference in the processing of inflectional vs. derivational morphology at the semantic level. In addition, the patient occasionally produced illegal stem + affix combinations. As these errors appeared in the absence of phonological paraphasias, they support the view that the phonological output lexicon has a morpheme-based organisation in Finnish. Finally, it was hypothesised that the stem representations of inflected nouns in the phonological output lexicon may be allomorph-based because formal transparency of inflection did not affect oral reading or word elicitation performance.