Authors:

Patterson, K. & Shewell, C.

Reference:

Year of publication:

1987

CBU number:

1758

Abstract:

Analyses of the speech and writing performance of a severly aphasic patient, G.A., were used to adress several issues. (1) Although it has often been assumed that writing is the language skill most vulnerable to aphasic impairment, G.A. is one of several patients who demonstrate (by, for example, their greater success in written than in oral naming of objects) that this need not be so. (2) An almost complete lack of overlap between the words which G.A was able to speak and those which she could spell reinforces the view that written spelling can occur independently of phonological processing. (3) In both ‘input’ tasks (e.g. auditory lexical decision) and ‘output’ tasks (e.g. single word repetition), G.A. showed word-class effects but with a cross-over: lexical decision yielded a advantage for content over function words, while repetition was more successful with function than content words. Since word-class effects, even within a particular patient, can be specific to task and/or modality, it appears that there is no single functional locus for such effects.