Abstract

Korean is highly productive as an agglutinative language which has rich verbal and nominal inflections. This chapter, which deals with various aspects of Korean morphology, such as nominal cases, prefinal endings, and final endings, will shed great light on the complex morpho-syntactic structure of Korean. It will review some research in morpho-syntactic processing by Korean aphasic patients. We will present some studies of morpho-syntactic processing such as case marker processing, morphemic ambiguity resolution, agrammatism, and questions relating to pronouns. Understanding the proposed experiments of aphasic data will give us insights concerning the determination of the ‘cognitive architecture’ of language.

Introduction

Neurolinguistics, as the study of the neurobiology of language, is concerned with the brain mechanism which permits us to understand and to produce language. Studying speakers whose language is impaired, along with their modes of acquisition and use of language, provides a window through which the structure and processing of language may be considered. Aphasic research has been an important area of neurolinguistics and is primarily devoted to an attempt to understand the relationship between the brain and language. The fact that damage to some parts of the brain results in language loss, but damage to other parts of the brain leaves language more or less intact, supports the view of the structured brain with separate faculties.

Current studies on aphasic research were mostly conducted with Indo-European languages. Findings obtained by studies on these languages do not confirm whether the phenomena or results are universal or language-specific ones.