For my doctoral research, I connected the field of linguistics with its theoretical underpinnings to the field of speech language pathology with its practical approach to language production by developing, testing, and evaluating a new tool for language rehabilitation after neurological damage, the Morphological Therapy Protocol.

Investigations of morphological impairment in aphasia have revealed that patients may retain knowledge of a word’s morphological status even when they cannot access that word (e.g., Delazer & Semenza, 1998). In addition, aphasiological investigations have shown that more errors are produced with multimorphemic words than with monomorphemic words (e.g., Nasti & marangolo, 2005). This points to the fact that even though individuals with aphasia seem to have retained sensitivity to morphological status and morphological structure of words, they are unable to process morphologically complex words with ease. The goal of my dissertation research was to investigate whether a therapy that focuses on morphology, the Morphological Therapy Protocol, will improve the processing of multimorphemic words in these patients.

Logistic mixed effects regression analyses revealed that the significant therapy effect (p < 0.0001) that was obtained after only 12 days of training for a group of four patients was maintained over a three-month post-therapy maintenance period.