A Case of Obligatory Access to Morphological Constituents

Abstract

This case study reports on a patient RS who showed obligatory and automatic access to the constituents of all English compounds. She would thus interpret the compound blueprint as ‘a print that is blue’. She also showed interpretations that suggested a blending of the whole-word and decomposed meanings of compounds. The compound seahorse was interpreted as ‘a small horse that swims’. It is argued that her behaviour presents evidence in favour of a parallel access model of multimorphemic word recognition in which constituents and whole-word forms are simultaneously accessed. Within such a framework, RS's performance can be interpreted as resulting from the inability to suppress the results of morphological decomposition.