G. Miceli et A. Caramazza, THE ASSIGNMENT OF WORD STRESS IN ORAL READING - EVIDENCE FROM A CASE OF ACQUIRED DYSLEXIA, Cognitive neuropsychology, 10(3), 1993, pp. 273-296
Patient CLB is severely impaired in naming familiar objects and in wri
ting to dictation and repeating familiar and novel words. His output i
n all these tasks is jargonaphasic. By contrast, his ability fo conver
t print to sound at the segmental level is remarkably spared. He showe
d no difficulty in reading nonwords and those words to which stress ma
y be assigned on the basis of syllabic structure. In reading aloud wor
ds with lexically assigned stress (but not words with syllabically ass
igned stress), however, CLB produced a large number of segmentally cor
rect, but suprasegmentally incorrect responses (e.g. sabato (Saturday)
--> /sa'bato/ instead of /'sabato/). Since his ability to use orthogr
aphic information in lexical decision and in comprehension tasks was o
nly very mildly impaired, his stress assignment errors would seem to b
e the result of damage to the phonological output lexicon. This patter
n of performance is interpreted as support for the hypothesis that the
phonological representations computed in speech production do not mer
ely consist of ordered sequences of phonemes, but consist instead of m
ultidimensional representations that specify (among other things) syll
abic structure.