A NEUROLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF MORPHOLOGICAL DEFICITS IN A FINNISH-SWEDISH BILINGUAL APHASIC

A bilingual aphasic with phonological dyslexia produced morphological paralexias when reading inflected Finnish and Swedish words. In both languages, derivatives were read as well as base-form nouns, whereas inflected forms posed difficulties. This suggests that inflected forms require additional processing like morphological decomposition during lexical access. Both Finnish and Swedish error corpora included occasional morphologically illegal stem+affix combinations, indicating that in lexical retrieval she was employing a morphologically decomposed phonological output lexicon. Her oral reading performance was not sensitive to the formal transparency of inflection, but in word elicitation the formally most opaque forms turned out to be most difficult to generate. An interesting finding in oral reading was our aphasic's tendency to substitute one affixed form for another in Finnish (a morphologically rich language) but to resort to monomorphemic forms in Swedish (a morphologically limited language). However, it is possible that this difference was merely a consequence of her segmental phonological difficulties in Swedish. Her performance pattern is best compatible with a so-called stem allomorph/inflectional decomposition model of lexical organization.