The production of morphological and lexical opposites in aphasia

Four unselected groups of Broca's, Wernicke's, conduction, amnesic aphasic patients and a group of normal controls were asked to produce the best opposite of 60 adjectives. For half of the stimuli the expected opposite was morphologically related to the stimulus word (e.g. "formal"/"informal"), for the other half it could be obtained only by selecting a new base-form within the lexicon (e.g. "good" / "bad"). Following some neurolinguistic observations by Hécaen et al., it was predicted that amnesic patients should produce mainly morphological opposites, whereas conduction aphasics should produce mainly lexical antonyms. Results confirmed the predictions, since amnesic aphasics showed a prevalent impairment in the selection of lexical opposites, whereas conduction aphasics showed a selective impairment in the production of morphological antonyms.