The Processing of Irregular Verbals in Korean Shown in Aphasics

Kim, Yunjung; Jeong, Jaebum; Nam, Kichun

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Commun Sci Disord. 2001;5(2): 1-16.

Yunjung Kim^` , Jaebum Jeong^` , and Kichun Nam^`

김윤정(Yunjung Kim)| 정재범(Jaebum Jeong)| 남기춘(Kichun Nam)

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the present study was to examine whether Korean regular and irregular verbals are differently represented in the mental lexicon. Two aphasic patient s participated in this study as subject s. In order to examine the sentence generation processing, the sentence completion task was employed. The basic form of the Korean verbals were presented at the top of the experimental sentences, and the patient s were asked to conjugate the basic forms to be appropriate for the blank given in the experimental sentences. If the Korean regular verbs and adverbs have different lexical representation format s in the mental lexicon from the irregular verbals, it is expected that the patient s would produce different patterns of conjugation error s between the regular and irregular verbals. However , if the regular and irregular verbals are represented in the similar way, then the conjugation error patterns will be similar . It was found that the patient s made many error s in conjugating the irregular verbals only when conjugation involves the root form change, whereas patient s made a few error s in conjugating the regular words and irregular words not involving root form change, regardless of conjugation regularity. And the conjugation error s shown in the irregular verbals involving the root form change occurred due to the tendency to keep the root form in the unchanged form. This result implicates that Korean regular and irregular verbs and adverbs are represented similarly in the mental lexicon and the categorical separation between the regular and irregular words can be decided depending on whether the root (or word stem) form changes or not.