Word formation: new evidence from aphasia

Three aphasic patients are described whose speech contains invented word-forms which are legal combinations of meaningful parts of real words, like "fratellismo" (brother + ness) instead of "fratellanza" (brother + hood), and from combinations of meaningless and meaningful parts, like "terness + ico" (where "ico" is a real adjectival ending). These phenomena are previously unreported. On the assumption that brain-damaged patients use residual rather than novel abilities, these forms, along with the patients' predominant use of real compound words, indicate that speakers have a procedure for composing polymorphemic words online, but this is employed just when trying to find a whole word fails.