title: The representation of compound headedness in the mental lexicon: a picture naming study in aphasia.
abstract: Most compound words are constituted of a head constituent (e.g., light in moonlight) and a modifier constituent (e.g., moon in moonlight); the information transmitted by these head-modifier roles is fundamental for defining the grammatical and semantic properties of the compound and for identifying a correct combination of the constituents at the conceptual level. The objective of this study is to assess how lexical processing in aphasia is influenced by the head-modifier structure of nominal compounds. A picture-naming task of 35 compounds with head-initial (pescespada, swordfish, literally fishsword) and head-final (autostrada, highway, literally carroad) forms was administered to 45 Italian aphasic patients, and their accuracy in retrieving constituents was analysed with a mixed-effects logistic regression. The interaction between headedness and constituent position was significant: The modifier emerged as being more difficult to retrieve than the head, but only for head-final compounds. The results are consistent with previous data from priming experiments on healthy subjects and provide convincing evidence that compound headedness is represented at central processing levels.
authors: a Center for Mind/Brain Sciences , University of Trento , Rovereto , Italy.
authors: Marco
authors: M
authors: Marelli
authors: Giusy
authors: G
authors: Zonca
authors: Antonella
authors: A
authors: Contardi
authors: Claudio
authors: C
authors: Luzzatti
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001037:Aphasia / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D012660:Semantics; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Aphasia.; Compound headedness; Compound words; Picture naming