Processing bound grammatical morphemes in context: The case of an aphasic patient

This study investigates the ability of an aphasic patient (DE) to process bound grammatical morphemes in normal sentential contexts. A word monitoring task examined the patient's sensitivity to the contextual appropriateness of derivational and inflectional suffixes. The results show that he is differentially sensitive to derivational and inflectional morphology. He is able to process derivational suffixes normally, but cannot discriminate between contextually appropriate and inappropriate inflectional suffixes. These findings are discussed with respect to current views on the processing of morphologically complex words in context.