CONSONANT HARMONY AS A COMPENSATORY MECHANISM IN FLUENT APHASIC SPEECH

This study addresses how fluent aphasics construct complete phonologic al representations, given the premise that their phonological speech e rrors result from faulty information about stored lexical representati ons. We explored whether consonant harmony, a common rule-governed pro cess of feature copying, operates as a compensatory device for complet ing phonological representations in fluent aphasia. This was examined in a corpus of phonemic paraphasias (n=543) produced by 8 fluent aphas ics during picture naming. Consonant substitutions due to a single fea ture change (n=143) were analyzed for the properties of consonant harm ony predicted by the phonological principles embodied in a Universal M arkedness version of Underspecification Theory (e.g., Chomsky and Hall e, 1968). Results indicated that harmony constrained the feature subst itution errors involving the feature class of voice (e.g., calendar--> /(sic)/), but not place of articulation (e.g., igloo-->/idlu/); substi tutions due to an error in manner were rare. These findings were used to argue that b for English-speaking fluent aphasics a consonant harmo ny rule for the feature voice is incorporated into a compensatory outp ut mechanism that is used to complete faulty lexical-phonological repr esentations.