Verbal Morpheme Retrieval in Aphasia

Park, Kyung-Ah; Kim, HyangHee; Park, Eun Sook; Shin, Ji Cheol

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2006;11(1): 51-63.

Kyung-Ah Park^` , HyangHee Kim^` , Eun Sook Park^` , and Ji Cheol Shin^`

박경아(Kyung-Ah Park)| 김향희(HyangHee Kim)| 박은숙(Eun Sook Park)| 신지철(Ji Cheol Shin)

ABSTRACT

It is often observed that patients with aphasia have difficulties in processing verbs constructed with the verb inflection and finite verb form. Previous studies suggested that verb inflection retrieval was differently performed. Specifically, aphasics have more difficulties in processing past than present tense, and more errors in processing tense than respectable-case morphemes. However, it has also been argued that aphasics have better aptitude for tense than for respectable-case morphemes. The purpose of this present study was to investigate how patients with aphasia process the following morphemes: respectable-case, passive-case, past-tense, present-tense and future-tense. The following results were obtained. First, aphasics were more impaired in producing both future-tense and passive-case morphemes than in producing present- or past-tense morphemes. Moreover, they had more difficulty in producing respectable-case than past-tense morphemes. Secondly, analysis of error patterns showed that the aphasics substituted both present- and past-tense more than future-tense morphemes. Thirdly, they had more substitution errors in future-tense than in past-tense morphemes. Consequently, aphasics can be differentiated by their performance in verbal morphemes according to the order of verbal morphemes acquisition. Furthermore, the error difference among the verbal morphemes might be ascribed to the frequency of occurrence and complexity of verbal morphemes. This study supports the hypothesis that there is a distinctive segregation in the retrieval of verbal morphemes.

Keywords: 실어증 | 동사 | 문법형태소 | 존칭 | 피동 | 시제 | aphasia