Lexical Recursion in Aphasia: Case Studies

Abstract

The processes of lexical recursion is examined by word-picture matching tests requiring the recursive construction of compound words. We used productive endocentric compounds whose rightmost constituent is a deverbal noun involving the affix -ó/-ő. Such heads take left-hand dependents in the role of complements, for instance: víz-tisztító-szerelő-oktató ‘water-cleaner-fitter-instructor’. Normal and aphasic subjects participated in the word-picture matching tests. Aphasics fell into two groups in terms of their patterns of responses. Anomic aphasics exhibited severe impairment in lexical recursion. They attempted compensatory strategies involving “exit to syntax” as a substitute for constructing the target compound words: they produced sentences or syntactic phrases rather than complex compounds. In this group lexical recursive operations turned out to be more impaired than sentence recursion. The compensation strategy involves a switch from the impaired subsystem to the unimpaired or less impaired subsystem. The other aphasic group involved Broca’s and conduction aphasics. They reacted to tasks requiring lexical recursion by the strategy of lexical search: they preferred the use of very simplex synonyms or hyperonyms to constructing the target compounds. Their recursive lexical operations showed a deficit and their recursive syntactic operations were also limited. There was no linguistic compensation strategy available for them.