CNL Lunch Talks

Yasmeen Faroqi Shah

Verbal Morphology in Aphasia

Thursday October 20th, 2005, 12:30 PM, 3416 Marie Mount Hall

Across most languages studied, verbs produced by aphasic individuals are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically incorrect inflectional affixes, such as Last night, I walking home. As per language production models, verb inflection errors in English could arise from three potential sources: encoding verbs' morphology based on temporal information at the conceptual level, accessing syntactic well-formedness constraints of verbal morphology, and encoding morphophonological form. We investigated these aspects of encoding verb inflections in aphasia. We demonstrate that production of verb morphology is impaired whenever temporal reference is involved, while morphological complexity, phonological complexity, or syntactic contraints are less likely to be the source of verb inflection errors in agrammatic aphasia.