Evidence of inflectional morphology in literal paraphasias and neologisms produced in a type of aphasia. A case study

Abstract

The study of inflectional morphology has been mainly centered around Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasias and has been concluded that there is different damage between the two, the first one presents alterations in the inflectional affixes, but not in the lexical root, while the second one presents the opposite pattern (Ullman et al. 1997). Our investigation tries to delve into these descriptions, which is why we focus on the analysis of inflectional morphemes that occur in: (i) nouns and verbs that present some type of paraphasia, and (ii) in nominal and verbal neologisms, produced by a patient with aphasia acoustic-amnesic. This syndrome is produced by a lesion in posterior zones —medium sectors of the temporal lobe— that causes a deficit in the audio-verbal retention (Luria 2015; Quintanar 1994). Methodologically, we start from the perspective of a case study (Caramazza 1986), to exhaustively describe the composition of paraphasias and neologisms. Our data comes from three dialogues videotaped, their transcription and further analysis. According to the results, we saw conservation of inflectional suffixes in both types of words, while lexical roots were found to have been altered. Finally, these results were consistent with the hypothesis that lesions in posterior zones caused lexical alterations (Ullman 2004), and alterations in the selection (Jakobson 1971a; Luria 1980); while grammatical elements, such as inflectional suffixes, are preserved.