OPERATIVITY AND ANIMACY EFFECTS IN APHASIC NAMING

This paper investigates the extent to which operativity and animacy af fect naming accuracy in 18 aphasic patients. Both operativity and anim acy have significant effects on naming accuracy when confounding varia bles are not properly controlled However, with sets of items matched f or length, frequency, familiarity, imageability, concreteness and rate d age-of-acquisition, only one subject showed a significant animacy ef fect (with better performance for animate items), and two subjects ske wed significant reversed operativity effects. The original definition of operativity included four elements: separability from the surroundi ng context, manipulability, firmness to the touch and availability to multiple senses. When the effects of these variables were investigated individually, it was found that, in general, patients are better at F laming separable items and those available to multiple senses but wors e al naming manipulable items. It is concluded that operativity is Plo t a single property but a set of variables with guile different effect s. These results emphasise the need for proper control of confounding variables in studies of animacy and operativity. The findings provide only qualified support for theories of distributed semantic representa tion.