LACK OF ERROR AWARENESS IN AN APHASIC PATIENT WITH RELATIVELY PRESERVED AUDITORY COMPREHENSION

The neuropsychological mechanisms underlying unawareness of speech/lan guage deficits are unknown, but four possibilities have been suggested : impaired lexical-semantic representations associated with impaired s peech comprehension, a failure of feedback, reduced attentional capaci ty, and psychological denial. We studied a patient who was unaware of his jargon aphasia despite only a mild auditory comprehension disturba nce. Delaying auditory feedback altered his speech patterns. He recogn ized more of his errors in a recording of his voice than he did while speaking. He also recognized more errors in a recording of the examine r making errors than he did when listening to the recordings of his ow n speech. Based on these results, we suggest that none of the proposed mechanisms can exclusively account for this man's performance and tha t each may contribute to his failure to detect and correct errors in s peech production.