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Abstract
We report the case of an English-speaking aphasic patient (JP) with left posterior-frontal
damage affecting the inferior frontal and precentral gyri. In speaking, JP was impaired
with the regular inflections of nouns and pseudonouns, making errors like "pears"
instead of pear or "door" for doors, while the spoken production of noun stems and
irregularly inflected nouns (teeth) was preserved. JP's noun inflection errors stemmed
from problems with inflection selection rather than a lack of understanding of concept
numerosity or phonological deficit. Evidence that inflection deficits occur independently
of semantic and phonological impairments supports accounts that propose dedicated
neural substrates for morphological processes and raises a challenge for connectionist
models that do not incorporate specific mechanisms for morphology. JP's results also
demonstrated a lexical deficit selectively affecting the retrieval of verb stems and
a more severe impairment for verb vs. noun inflections. JP's verb production deficit
suggests a close interaction between inflectional and lexical processes probably reflecting
the fact that English inflection choice in part depends on stem information stored
in the lexicon.