A Study of Morphological Errors in Aphasic Language

How do aphasics deal with the inflectional marking occurring in agglutinative languages like Korean? Korean speech repetition, comprehension and production were studied in 3 Broca's aphasic speakers of Korean. As experimental materials, 100 easy sentences were chosen in 1st grade Korean elementary school textbooks about reading writing and listening, and two pictures were made from each sentence. This study examines the use of three kinds of inflectional markings--past tense, nominative case, and accusative case. The analysis focuses on whether each inflectional marking was performed well or not in tasks such as repetition, comprehension and production. In addition, morphological errors concerned with each inflectional marking were analyzed in view of markedness. In general, the aphasic subjects showed a clear preservation of the morphological aspects of their native language. So the view of Broca's aphasics as agrammatical could not be strongly supported. It can be suggested that nominative case and accusative case are marked elements in Korean.