PICTURE WRITTEN NAMING - PERFORMANCE PARALLELS AND DIVERGENCES BETWEEN APHASIC PATIENTS AND NORMAL SUBJECTS

The study compares the performance of a group of aphasic patients and a group of normal subjects submitted to the same picture confrontation naming task with written responses. Analyses concerned on the one han d the effects of variables characterizing pictures and their names, an d on the other hand the types of misnamings. In both cases, results in dicated some similarities (e.g. prominent role of orthographic variabl es) as well as some dissimilarities (e.g. differential effects of vari ables). In addition, the classical hypothesis relating the production of verbal misnamings in aphasic patients to the production of associat e names in normal subjects (Rinnert and Whitaker 1973) received little support. Non-dominant picture naming responses incidentally observed in normal subjects accounted for a higher proportion of verbal misnami ngs than associates.