A NEURAL-NETWORK SIMULATION METHOD OF APHASIC NAMING ERRORS - PROPERTIES AND BEHAVIOR

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by brain damage. Naming errors w hich are common in aphasia are applied to reveal the type and the effe cts of a disorder. Naming in this research field refers to psycholingu istic tests where a subject is asked to say the name of an object pres ented as a picture to him or her. We have earlier presented a simulati on model on the basis of neural networks [1,2]. The model is further d eveloped here, and its properties and behaviour are described in the p resent paper. The simulation model includes a bounded set of Finnish w ords in their base lingual form. The principle of activation spreading Is used to process naming errors with the method to simulate actual a phasic errors. All computation in the model is executed with words as text or with textual components of words, although the system processe s naming errors, i.e. human speech.