A morphological processing deficit in verbs but not in nouns: a case study in a highly inflected language

Aspects of time: Time reference and aspect production in Russian aphasic speakers

“…Greek aspect is an inflectional grammatical category (Tsapkini, Jarema, & Kehayia, 2002;Xydopoulos, 1996), and is therefore expected to be impaired in aphasic speakers similarly to any inflectional grammatical category (although not necessarily to the same extent). In contrast, Russian aspect is expressed through derivational morphology and is interrelated with lexical aspect (Hamburger, 1984;Tatevosov, 2002;Zaliznyak & Shmelev, 2000).…”

“…That constitutes a possible explanation for the differences between the Russian and Greek (Nanousi et al, 2006;Stavrakaki & Kouvava, 2003) results. In contrast to Russian aspect, which is related to derivational morphology and is more lexical in nature (at least in children and individuals with aphasia), Greek aspect is a grammatical category expressed through inflection (Tsapkini et al, 2002;Xydopoulos, 1996). While lexical semantics are more resistant under limited processing resources, this may not be the case for pure grammatical categories.…”

The perfective past tense in Greek child language

“…Sigmatic past-tense forms have been considered to be 'regular' in the sense that they involve a segmentable affix (-s-) paired with phonologically predictable stem changes; non-sigmatic past-tense forms, by contrast, exhibit properties typical of 'irregular' inflection in that they involve unsystematic and even suppletive stem changes and no segmentable (perfective pasttense) affix (for discussion see e.g. Ralli 1988Ralli , 2003Terzi, Papapetropoulos & Kouvelas 2005;Tsapkini, Jarema, Kehayia 2001, 2002a, 2002b. Consider the following examples.…”

“…In addition, Tsapkini and colleagues presented several studies examining the performance of non-fluent patients on the Greek past tense (Tsapkini et al 2001, Tsapkini et al 2002aTsapkini et al 2002b). Tsapkini et al (2002a) found that the non-fluent patient they studied had more problems with the production of non-sigmatic perfective past-tense forms such as pleno -eplina 'I wash -I washed' than with sigmatic forms involving -s-suffixation. Tsapkini et al (2001) reported that their non-fluent patient was impaired in producing perfective past tense forms that required both a stem change and -s-suffixation.…”

Neural processing of nouns and verbs: the role of inflectional morphology

“…First, they are distinguished in some linguistic theories such as Pollock's split inflection hypothesis (Pollock, 1989) where there are structural differences between tense and agreement, each forming a distinct functional category. Second, in the relatively small number of neuropsychological studies where the morpho-syntactic functions of nouns and verbs have been compared, some patients show greater difficulties with morpho-syntactic operations involving nouns compared to verbs (Shapiro, Shelton, & Caramazza, 2000), while other patients have been reported with the opposite problem (Goodglass, Christiansen, & Gallagher, 1993;Tsapkini, Jarema, & Kehayia, 2002). For example, Goodglass et al found that in both production and comprehension tests, non-fluent aphasic patients performed better on English plural nouns than on inflected verbs, even third person singular verbs.…”