Morfologische Aspecten Van Woordherkenning Bij Broca-Patienten

It is often stated that Broca's aphasies have problems in dealing with the set of closed class items. From a linguistic point of view, the derivational and inflectional suffixes belong to this set also. In two lexical decision experiments recognition and representation of derived and inflected word forms was studied in seven Broca's aphasies. The first study shows there is no decomposition process involved in recognizing derivational word forms: RT correlates with word form frequency and not with stem frequency. Inflected forms, however, appear to be represented 'under their stem' and therefore are recognized via the stem. Apart from the fact that Broca's aphasies are slower than age matched control subjects, the pattern of results is very similar to that of the control subjects. It can be concluded that Broca's aphasies do not show specific problems in dealing with suffixes, and that derivational and inflectional affixes may be processed differently, both by normals and Broca's aphasies·