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

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.