THE REPRESENTATION OF STRESS - EVIDENCE FROM AN APHASIC PATIENT

We report the case of an aphasic patient who, following an acquired le sion involving the left temporo-parietal cortex, produced many word st ress errors in spontaneous speech, naming of objects and reading aloud . The stress impairment concerned exclusively words in which stress wa s unpredictable on the basis of syllabic structure, and was equally se vere in naming and reading aloud. Errors were significantly more frequ ent in the cases of words with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, and of low frequency words. There was a high consistency between erro rs in naming and reading aloud, These findings suggest that stress rep resentation can be selectively impaired after brain damage; we hypothe sise that a partial disorder at the level of the form lexicon, involvi ng the representation of lexical stress, can account for most of the f eatures of the patient's performance. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.