Demonstrating a wordlikeness effect on nonword repetition performance in a conduction aphasic patient

Brain Lang. 2003 May;85(2):222-30. doi: 10.1016/s0093-934x(02)00589-8.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to identify the nature of the deficit for a conduction aphasic patient in order to evaluate two different theories of conduction aphasia. First, a conduction aphasic patient FS was tested on auditory word-pair discrimination, word-repetition, and picture-naming. The results of these tasks indicated that her deficit was likely to be post-lexical rather than perceptual or lexical. Next, we examined her repetition performance for two types of nonwords (high-wordlike and low-wordlike nonwords) to distinguish the two theories. FS exhibited a wordlikeness effect: she produced more correct moras and more correct combinations of moras for high-wordlike nonwords than low-wordlike nonwords. We conclude that she had difficulty in maintaining stable phonological representations of verbal materials in the output buffer.

Publication types

  • Case Reports

MeSH terms

  • Aged
  • Aphasia, Conduction / diagnosis
  • Aphasia, Conduction / physiopathology*
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Phonetics
  • Random Allocation
  • Severity of Illness Index
  • Speech Production Measurement
  • Verbal Behavior*
  • Vocabulary*