THE ASSIGNMENT OF WORD STRESS IN ORAL READING - EVIDENCE FROM A CASE OF ACQUIRED DYSLEXIA

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.