Processing of disyllabic compound words in Chinese aphasia: Evidence for the processing limitations account

Abstract

The current study addresses the debate between so-called `structural` and `processing limitation` accounts of aphasia, i.e., whether language impairments reflect the `loss` of linguistic knowledge or its representations, or instead reflect a limitation in processing resources. Confrontation-naming task and category-judgment tasks were used to examine and compare the performance of non-fluent and fluent aphasics on different compound types of nouns and verbs. We demonstrate that aphasic patients` performance is modulated by the canonicity of the particular compound type, a result that holds true even for the category in which patients show a `selective category deficit.` These findings weigh against the `loss` of linguistic representations as the underlying cause of noun-verb deficits, instead supporting a `processing limitations` approach.