Edited by Sedigheh Moradi, Marcia Haag, Janie Rees-Miller and Andrija Petrovic
[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 353] 2021
► pp. 127–146
Studies in aphasia provide important information about how the brain may represent and process morphologically complex words. The main morphological processes (inflection, derivation and compounding) uncover a fine-grained brain organization. The study of errors, in aphasic syndromes and other disorders like unilateral spatial neglect, clearly determined by failures in morphological processing, has made it possible to clarify several different questions. Evidence was found for stems and affixes to be separately represented. Moreover, evidence for decomposition in processing has also been provided, favoring, however, dual route hypotheses. Information about morphology, it was shown, could persist in absence of the ability to retrieve full phonological forms. Headedness was shown to have psychological reality and neural underpinnings.