Split Inflection in Neurolinguistics

Since Pollock’s 1989 paper, much linguistic argumentation has been mounted in favor of the split inflection hypothesis. This paper presents evidence from a neuropsychological angle in support of this hypothesis. Given that agrammatic aphasic patients demonstrate a selective deficit in the syntactic domain, it is tempting to look for impairment patterns that pertain to issues debated in current syntactic theory. Some arguments from agrammatism to linguistics have already been put forth in the past (cf. Grodzinsky, 1990; Grodzinsky, Wexler, Chien, Marakovitz & Solomon, 1993). We will focus on the inflectional domain, and show that the agrammatic selective breakdown pattern follows the exact same line that the theory sketches between subparts of inflection: tense and agreement. Thus, we will present corroborating evidence to the theory, by showing how natural classes within it behave differentially in aphasia. In addition, we will show that the impairment in tense node has implications upon higher nodes in the syntactic tree. We believe that these claims are relevant to anyone interested in psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic aspects of the theory of syntax. Moreover, they are of special interest to students of language acquisition, where somewhat parallel (yet very different)