Miceli Gabriele, Capasso Rita, Caramazza Alfonso
Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università Cattolica, Largo A. Gemelli 8, 00168 Rome, Italy.
Neuropsychologia. 2004;42(3):273-87. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2003.09.002.
Current theories of single-word processing predict that in some cases brain damage should selectively impair morphological processes, resulting in the selective occurrence of morphological errors. However, such a selective pattern of errors has never been documented, and the available case studies report the systematic association of morphological and phonological (segmental) errors in the same subject. The number of relevant case reports is very small, however. To better understand the relationship between morphological and phonological processes, we analyzed the repetition performance of 26 subjects who produced morphological errors in a screening battery for aphasia. Although the results confirm that subjects who make morphological errors also invariably make phonological errors, the probabilities of the two types of errors are not (quantitatively) correlated. Furthermore, the relationship between morphological and phonological errors was asymmetrical: although all subjects who produced morphological errors also produced phonological errors, some aphasics who produced phonological errors did not also produce morphological errors. The one-way relationship between morphological and phonological errors could result either from the anatomical proximity of the structures involved in morphological and phonological processes, or from the functional inseparability of the two processes. The fact that phonological errors can occur either in isolation or in association with morphological errors could be attributed to the functional heterogeneity of phonological errors, and to the separability of the neural substrates involved in processing various aspects of phonological information.
当前关于单字加工的理论预测，在某些情况下，脑损伤应会选择性地损害形态加工过程，从而导致形态错误的选择性出现。然而，这种选择性的错误模式从未被记录下来，现有的病例研究报告了同一受试者中形态错误和语音（音段）错误的系统性关联。不过，相关病例报告的数量非常少。为了更好地理解形态加工和语音加工之间的关系，我们分析了26名在失语症筛查测试中出现形态错误的受试者的复述表现。虽然结果证实了出现形态错误的受试者也总是会出现语音错误，但这两种错误的概率（在数量上）并无关联。此外，形态错误和语音错误之间的关系是不对称的：虽然所有出现形态错误的受试者也会出现语音错误，但一些出现语音错误的失语症患者并未出现形态错误。形态错误和语音错误之间的单向关系可能是由于参与形态加工和语音加工的结构在解剖学上相邻，或者是由于这两个加工过程在功能上不可分割。语音错误既可以单独出现，也可以与形态错误一起出现，这一事实可能归因于语音错误的功能异质性，以及参与处理语音信息各个方面的神经基质的可分离性。
