Examination of the lexical errors (phonological paraphasias and neologisms) of two posterior aphasic patients who are speakers of Finnish, a highly synthetic language, revealed that the lexical difficulties generally typical of posterior aphasics were found in these patients as well. The typical lexical difficulties clustered around open class words such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In such patients phonological paraphasias make up 60 percent of the errors. The results of this study show that posterior aphasia patients exhibit more errors toward the end of words, peaking around the 4th to 6th phoneme. In addition, the data suggest that paraphasias tend to occur after word formation rules have been applied and that neologisms are probably formed before application of word formation rules. The patterns of morphosyntactic marker errors also suggest that surface case marking carries some consistent deviations. The limited usefulness of the traditional one-component view of phonology is emphasized, and it is proposed that the formal aspect of words can be maltreated at various stages of language production. (MSE)