Khwaileh Tariq, Body Richard, Herbert Ruth
a Department of English Literature and Linguistics , Qatar University , Doha , Qatar.
b Department of Human Communication Sciences , The University of Sheffield , Sheffield , UK.
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2015;32(6):340-67. doi: 10.1080/02643294.2015.1074893. Epub 2015 Oct 5.
Within the domain of inflectional morpho-syntax, differential processing of regular and irregular forms has been found in healthy speakers and in aphasia. One view assumes that irregular forms are retrieved as full entities, while regular forms are compiled on-line. An alternative view holds that a single mechanism oversees regular and irregular forms. Arabic offers an opportunity to study this phenomenon, as Arabic nouns contain a consonantal root, delivering lexical meaning, and a vocalic pattern, delivering syntactic information, such as gender and number. The aim of this study is to investigate morpho-syntactic processing of regular (sound) and irregular (broken) Arabic plurals in patients with morpho-syntactic impairment. Three participants with acquired agrammatic aphasia produced plural forms in a picture-naming task. We measured overall response accuracy, then analysed lexical errors and morpho-syntactic errors, separately. Error analysis revealed different patterns of morpho-syntactic errors depending on the type of pluralization (sound vs broken). Omissions formed the vast majority of errors in sound plurals, while substitution was the only error mechanism that occurred in broken plurals. The dissociation was statistically significant for retrieval of morpho-syntactic information (vocalic pattern) but not for lexical meaning (consonantal root), suggesting that the participants' selective impairment was an effect of the morpho-syntax of plurals. These results suggest that irregular plurals forms are stored, while regular forms are derived. The current findings support the findings from other languages and provide a new analysis technique for data from languages with non-concatenative morpho-syntax.
在屈折形态句法领域，健康受试者和失语症患者对规则形式和不规则形式存在差异加工。一种观点认为，不规则形式作为完整的实体被提取，而规则形式则是在线编译的。另一种观点认为，单一机制负责处理规则形式和不规则形式。阿拉伯语为研究这一现象提供了契机，因为阿拉伯语名词包含一个传达词汇意义的辅音词根和一个传达句法信息（如性和数）的元音模式。本研究的目的是调查形态句法受损患者对规则（语音）和不规则（破碎）阿拉伯语复数的形态句法加工。三名获得性语法性失语症患者在图片命名任务中产出复数形式。我们测量了总体反应准确性，然后分别分析了词汇错误和形态句法错误。错误分析显示，根据复数形式的类型（语音型与破碎型），形态句法错误模式不同。语音型复数中，遗漏错误占绝大多数，而替代是破碎型复数中唯一出现的错误机制。在形态句法信息（元音模式）的提取方面，这种分离具有统计学意义，但在词汇意义（辅音词根）方面则不然，这表明受试者的选择性损伤是复数形态句法的影响。这些结果表明，不规则复数形式是存储的，而规则形式是派生的。目前的研究结果支持了其他语言的研究结果，并为来自具有非连接形态句法的语言的数据提供了一种新的分析技术。
