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Morphological errors and the representation of morphology in the lexical-semantic system
1Istituto di Neurologia, Università Cattolica, Roma, IRCCS S. Lucia, Italy.
Summary
Neuropsychological studies show that word morphology is processed independently in the brain. This research explores how word meaning and form are represented and processed in both healthy individuals and those with aphasia.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuropsychology
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Morphology is autonomously represented in the brain at both semantic and word-form levels.
- Understanding morphological processing is key to understanding language production and comprehension.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the autonomous representation of morphology in word meaning and form.
- To examine the processes of morphological decomposition in word production and perception.
- To analyze morphological errors in aphasia within the context of semantic and phonemic processing.
Main Methods:
- Neuropsychological study of language processing.
- Analysis of morphological, semantic, and phonemic errors in transcoding tasks.
- Review of existing literature on morphological representation in the lexicon.
Main Results:
- Morphologically organized semantic information activates lexical representations (roots and affixes) during output.
- Stimulus parsing along the morphological dimension accesses lexical representations during input.
- Inflectional and derivational morphology are independently represented; inflected words fully decompose, derived words decompose into base form + affix.
Conclusions:
- Morphological errors in aphasia co-occur with semantic and/or phonemic errors, indicating complex neural underpinnings.
- Damage to both morphological representations and sublexical conversion procedures is required for morphological transcoding errors.
- The precise theoretical meaning of co-occurring morphological and phonemic errors remains uncertain.