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Morphological decomposition of inflected words: Evidence from aphasia

Anna Chrabaszcz1*, Ekaterina Iskra1, 2, Kira Gor3 and Olga Dragoy1
  • 1 National Research University Higher School of Economics, Neurolinguistics Laboratory, Russia
  • 2 Center for Speech Pathology and Neurorehabilitation, Russia
  • 3 University of Maryland, United States

Very few studies have examined how individuals with post-stroke aphasia process inflected words, although morphological impairment has been associated with both fluent (Bastiaanse, 2011; Butterworth et al., 1990) and non-fluent (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997; Tsapkini, Jarema, & Kehayia, 2001) aphasia. Importantly, however, investigating morphological processing in individuals with aphasia may contribute to the ongoing debate about how inflected forms are computed. Two opposing views exist on this subject. According to the whole-word storage account, inflected words are stored and retrieved from the mental lexicon in their whole forms (Butterworth, 1983). The decompositional view holds that inflected words are decomposed into constituent morphemes and are computed using combinatorial mechanisms (Fruchter & Marantz, 2015; Taft, 2004). The present study examines the predictions of these two accounts in a group of individuals with fluent vs. non-fluent aphasia processing inflected nouns in Russian – a language with rich morphology. Participants (n=20, mean age = 48.6, 10 females) performed an auditory lexical decision task adapted from Gor, Chrabaszcz and Cook (2017). Stimuli consisted of 80 Russian nouns, 80 nonwords, and 80 filler nouns. Nouns were counterbalanced across four conditions, in which two factors were fully crossed: the type of inflection (overtly or zero inflected nouns) and the type of case (citation or oblique). Stimulus nonwords contained nonexistent stems that complied with Russian phonotactic rules. A linear mixed-effects modeling approach was used to analyze log-transformed reaction time (RT) data; a logistic mixed-effects model (glm function) was used to analyze error rate (ER) data. Results revealed a significant effect of case type both in RT and ER analyses (Est. = 807.27, SE = 151, t = 5.34, p < .001, and Est. = 1.63, SE = 0.6, z = 2.8, p < .01, respectively), but no significant effect of inflection type. Thus, citation forms were processed faster and with fewer errors compared to oblique forms regardless of the presence or absence of inflection. Hence, no additional processing costs were found for surface decomposition of the word into its constituent morphemes (stem + inflection). Rather, processing costs were associated with locating the form within the nominal paradigm of the Russian language (“reverse engineering” the oblique form into the citation form). These results suggest a hierarchical structure of the inflectional paradigm in the mental representation, with the citation form as the nucleus (cf. similar results for neurologically healthy participants in Lukatela et al., 1980; Gor et al., 2017). Additionally, a significant interaction of aphasia type and case type in the RT analysis (Est. = -342.9, SE = 123.8, t = -2.77, p < .01) suggests that individuals with non-fluent aphasia processed overtly and zero inflected nouns more slowly, even more so in the oblique case. This finding is consistent with the traditional accounts positing greater morphological difficulties for individuals with non-fluent rather than fluent aphasia (e.g., Goodglass, Christiansen, & Gallagher, 1993).

References

Bastiaanse, R. (2011). The retrieval and inflection of verbs in the spontaneous speech of fluent aphasic speakers. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 24(2), 163-172.
Butterworth, B. (1983). Lexical representation. In B. Butterworth (Ed.), Language production: Development, writing and other language processes (pp. 257–294). London: Academic Press.
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Friedmann, N. A., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56(3), 397-425.
Fruchter, J., & Marantz, A. (2015). Decomposition, lookup, and recombination: MEG evidence for the Full Decomposition model of complex visual word recognition. Brain and Language, 143, 81–96
Gor, K., Chrabaszcz, A., & Cook, S. (2017). Processing of native and nonnative inflected words: Beyond affix stripping. Journal of Memory and Language, 93, 315-332.
Goodglass, H., Christiansen, J. A., & Gallagher, R. (1993). Comparison of morphology and syntax in free narrative and structured tests: Fluent vs. nonfluent aphasics. Cortex, 29(3), 377-407.
Lukatela, G., Gligorijevic, B., Kostic´, A., & Turvey, M. T. (1980). Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon. Memory & Cognition, 8, 415–423.
Taft, M. (2004). Morphological decomposition and the reverse base frequency effect. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57A(4), 745–765.
Tsapkini, K., Jarema, G., & Kehayia, E. (2001). Manifestations of morphological impairments in Greek aphasia: A case study. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 14(2), 281-296.

Keywords: morphological decomposition, Noun inflection, Russian, fluent aphasia, non-fluent aphasia

Conference: Academy of Aphasia 55th Annual Meeting , Baltimore, United States, 5 Nov - 7 Nov, 2017.

Presentation Type: poster presentation

Topic: General Submission

Citation: Chrabaszcz A, Iskra E, Gor K and Dragoy O (2019). Morphological decomposition of inflected words: Evidence from aphasia
. Conference Abstract: Academy of Aphasia 55th Annual Meeting . doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2017.223.00009

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Received: 28 Apr 2017; Published Online: 25 Jan 2019.

* Correspondence: Dr. Anna Chrabaszcz, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Neurolinguistics Laboratory, Moscow, Russia, anna.lukyanchenko@gmail.com