MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSING IN ITALIAN AGRAMMATIC SPEAKERS - 8 EXPERIMENTS IN LEXICAL MORPHOLOGY

Agrammatic speech production has often been characterized as amorpholo gy. This study of two Italian agrammatic patients shows that, with res pect to inflectional morphology of simple and derived norms, the morph ological features of gender and number are almost fully preserved for one patient (MG) and only mildly disturbed in the other patient (DR). Like inflection, the use of derivational suffixation as a means of wor d-building is only mildly disturbed in both patients. However, they sh ow a severe disturbance with respect to inflectional morphology of lex ical compounds, which requires syntactic analysis at the word level. M oreover, they are severely impaired in the choice of the function word for the construction of prepositional compounds, syntactically genera ted phrases which have the status of a word. Apart from such syntax-de pendent morphological and word-building operations, neither inflection al nor derivational morphology are seriously disturbed in our patients . The apparent amorphology in their spontaneous speech can thus not be explained by a disorder of morphological representations in the lexic on system per se. In another study (De Bleser and Luzzatti, 1994) we w ere able to show that the patients had severe problems with the implem entation of morphology in specific syntactic contexts, thus pointing t o a problem in morphosyntactic rather than morpholexical processing as a factor contributing to agrammatic speech production. (C) 1996 Acade mic Press, Inc.