Neurolinguistic evidence for rule-based nominal suffixation

This article presents a new set of experimental data from brain-damaged aphasic patients as well as from normals on the processing of two nominal suffixes in Japanese, i.e. -sa and -mi. Their difference with respect to productivity, as confirmed by the experiment on normal adults, provides evidence for the existence of a productive rule-like process in derivational morphology and supports the validity of the dual-mechanism model by integrating derivational morphology in its scope. The experiment on aphasic patients revealed a dissociation, which demonstrates that the two suffixation processes involve two different neurological mechanisms, and provides crucial evidence for the claim that the difference in the productivity of these two suffixes is of a qualitative nature and not a matter of degree.