PHONOLOGICAL FACILITATION OF SEMANTIC ERRORS IN NORMAL AND APHASIC SPEAKERS

Semantic errors produced by normal and aphasic speakers on a picture n aming test were examined for their phonological similarity to the targ ets they replaced. In both groups of subjects, semantic errors preserv ed phonological characteristics of the target word at rates greater th an would be expected by chance. These results are consistent with prev ious findings in speech error corpora (e.g. Dell & Reich, 1981) and er ror elicitation studies (Martin, Weisberg, & Saffran, 1989) and lend s upport to the assumption that semantic and phonological representation s of a word are retrieved in two overlapping stages. In addition to ex tending this finding to the aphasic population, the use of a picture n aming task in the present study eliminated some of the potential confo unds that arise in connected speech. In a second study, we examined ph onological relationships within sets of semantically related words and showed that there is no tendency for these words to share phonologica l characteristics. This finding substantiates the argument that the te ndency for semantic errors to preserve phonological characteristics of the target word does not arise by chance. We discuss these results in relation to alternative models of lexical retrieval.