SINGLE WORD PRODUCTION IN NONFLUENT PROGRESSIVE APHASIA

We present an experimental investigation of the spoken single word pro duction of two patients with nonfluent progressive aphasia. In Experim ent 1, a task effect (reading > repetition > naming) suggested that ph onological information available from task stimuli facilitated the pat ients' speech production; a length effect reflected the increased diff iculty of phonological processing required for long words compared wit h that required for shorter words. Experiment 2 compared repetition, r eading, copying, and writing to dictation tasks and demonstrated that a correspondence between input and output modality also facilitated pe rformance. Experiment 3 showed that the patients' access to appropriat e phonology in reading was positively related to the degree of correla tion between orthographic and phonological forms. These results are di scussed with reference to an account of pathologically weakened connec tions between nodes in an interactive spreading activation model of sp eech production of the type described by Dell (1986). (C) 1998 Academi c Press.