CONVERGING EVIDENCE FOR THE INTERACTION OF SEMANTIC AND SUBLEXICAL PHONOLOGICAL INFORMATION IN ACCESSING LEXICAL REPRESENTATIONS FOR SPOKENOUTPUT

Detailed studies of naming, reading, and comprehension by three brain- damaged patients are reported. The three subjects had different patter ns of performance across lexical tasks, which are best explicated by p roposing, for each case, separate loci of damage to one or more compon ents of the lexical system. Nevertheless, all three patients showed be tter oral reading than would be expected on the basis of either their demonstrated abilities in lexical-semantic processing or their demonst rated abilities in sublexical orthography-to-phonology conversion. The disproportionately intact oral reading in each of these subjects can be explained either by proposing a nonsemantic ''direct route'' of rea ding and/or by proposing that at least partial semantic information in teracts with at least partial sublexical phonological information to a ccess lexico-phonological representations for output in the task of or al reading. Evidence favouring the latter hypothesis was provided by s tudies of the subjects' performance on a variety of tasks in which par tial semantic information and/or partial or complete sublexical phonol ogical information were presented to facilitate oral production. Also, further analyses of the patients' oral reading as a function of compl ete vs. incomplete vs. abolished comprehension of printed words, and a s a function of orthographic regularity, were consistent with specific predictions that follow from the hypothesis that (even partial) seman tic information and (even partial) sublexical phonological information interact to access lexico-phonological representations for output.