ORIGINS OF NEOLOGISMS IN PICTURE NAMING BY FLUENT APHASICS

An apparent dichotomy in target segment preservation among aphasic neo logistic utterances has prompted proposals that abstruse neologisms ar ise at lexical retrieval and target-related neologisms arise at lexica l retrieval and target-related neologisms arise during phonological en coding. This study sought evidence for two origins of neologism genera tion. A corpus of 253 neologisms produced by 20 aphasics in a picture naming task was examined for evidence of bimodality in degree of targe t relatedness; none was found. The prediction that lexical effects sho uld be associated with abstruse neologisms and postlexical effects wit h target-related neologisms was also not confirmed. The findings fail to support two distinct stages of origin.