LEXICALIZATION ERRORS IN WRITING ARABIC NUMERALS - A SINGLE-CASE STUDY

This paper presents a single-case study of a patient suffering from se veral impairments in number processing. The main focus of the paper is to describe and interpret the patient's errors in verbal to arabic tr anscoding. The errors were of the syntactical type and consisted of pa rtial lexicalizations appearing mainly in response to items with Thous and in sum relationships and less frequently with Hundred in sum relat ionships. The Discussion section compares three models in their abilit y to account for the patient's dissociation. It was suggested that mod els such as that of McCloskey, Caramazza, and Basili (1985), postulati ng a semantic representation for numbers built up on a base-ten system , are unable to account for the patient's errors. By contrast, Power e t al.'s perspective (Power & Longuet-Higgins, 1978; Power & Dal Martel lo, 1990), which posits a semantic representation of numbers reflectin g the structure of the verbal numeral system, could provide an economi cal interpretation for the dissociation observed between the mastery o f sum and product relationships. Similarly, the asemantic transcoding model developed by Deloche and Seron (1987) gives a valid account for the patient's profile. (C) 1995 Academic Press, Inc.