Shuster Victoria P, Miozzo Michele
a Department of Psychology , The New School , New York , NY , USA.
Cogn Neuropsychol. 2017 Feb-Mar;34(1-2):52-63. doi: 10.1080/02643294.2017.1308344. Epub 2017 Apr 9.
We report on an English-speaking, aphasic individual (TB) who showed a striking dissociation in speaking with the different forms (allomorphs) that an inflection can take. Although very accurate in producing the consonantal inflections (-/s/, -/z/, -/d/, -/t/), TB consistently omitted syllabic inflections (-/əz/, -/əd/), therefore correctly saying "dogs" or "walked," but "bench" for benches or "skate" for skated. Results from control tests ruled out that TB's selective difficulties stemmed from problems in selecting the correct inflection for the syntactic context or problems related to phonological or articulatory mechanisms. TB's selective difficulties appeared instead to concern morpho-phonological mechanisms responsible for adapting morphological elements to word phonology. These mechanisms determine whether the plural inflection surfaces in the noun bench as voiced (-/z/), unvoiced (-/s/) or syllabic (-/əz/). Our results have implications for understanding how morphological elements are encoded in the lexicon and the nature of morpho-phonological mechanisms involved in speech production.
我们报告了一位讲英语的失语个体（TB），他在说出屈折变化可能采取的不同形式（语素变体）时表现出显著的分离现象。尽管TB在发出辅音性屈折变化（-/s/、-/z/、-/d/、-/t/）时非常准确，但他始终会省略音节性屈折变化（-/əz/、-/əd/），因此能正确说出“dogs”或“walked”，但会把“benches”说成“bench”，把“skated”说成“skate”。对照测试的结果排除了TB的选择性困难源于为句法语境选择正确屈折变化时出现的问题，或与语音或发音机制相关的问题。相反，TB的选择性困难似乎涉及负责使形态元素适应单词音系的形态音系机制。这些机制决定了名词“bench”的复数屈折变化是以浊音（-/z/）、清音（-/s/）还是音节（-/əz/）形式出现。我们的研究结果对于理解形态元素在词汇中的编码方式以及言语产生中涉及的形态音系机制的性质具有启示意义。
