Selective impairment of morphosyntactic production in a neurological patient

Abstract

In this paper we describe the impaired morphosyntactic production of a neurological patient (R.B.). The patient's production of almost all freestanding morphological material (e.g. subjects, verbs, and function words) is unimpaired, while production of bound inflectional morphology is impaired. We show that this impairment involves featural information on both verbs and nouns and discuss it in the context of the Distributed Morphology model of morphosyntactic processing. We conclude that her error pattern is consistent with impaired ability to convert featural information to morphological material after sentence formation is complete.

Fig. 1

Several proposed structures for the split Inflectional Phrase (IP) in English.

Fig. 2

A syntactic tree structure (see text for details).

Fig. 3

Split Inflectional Phrase (IP) used to analyze our patient’s data (after Ouhalla (1990) and Hendrick (1991)).