Morphological representation of compound nouns: A study on Italian aphasic patients

Two experiments are reported whereby naming tasks for compound and monomorphemic nouns were administered to Italian aphasics. The results suggest that patients who are unable to retrieve compound nouns may still be able to retain morphological knowledge about target compound nouns in absence of the ability to retrieve its phonological form. These findings confirm previous observations in German speaking aphasics: an identical result in Italian was not easily predictable, given the differences of the Italian compounding system. Another important result came from the performance of Broca's aphasics who are known, as a group, to have difficulty in naming actions. They tended to omit the verb component of noun compounds with a verb-noun structure. This finding provides a strong indication that compound words are parsed into their component parts in the course of lexical retrieval. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.