NEOLOGISTIC JARGON SPARING NUMBERS - A CATEGORY-SPECIFIC PHONOLOGICALIMPAIRMENT

We report the case of a patient suffering from a severe neologistic ja rgon sparing number words. Neologisms resulted from pervasive phoneme substitutions with frequent preservation of the overall syllabic struc ture (e.g. /revolver/ --> /reveltil/). Word and nonword reading, as we ll as picture naming, were equally affected. No significant influence of frequency, imageability, and grammatical class was found. In striki ng contrast with this severe speech impairment, the patient made virtu ally no phonological errors when reading aloud arabic or spelled-out n umerals, but made frequent word selection errors (e.g. 250 --> ''four hundred and sixty''). This observation indicates that during speech pl anning, different categories of words are processed by separable brain systems down to the level of phoneme selection, a more peripheral lev el than was previously assumed. Number words may be singled out during phonological processing either because they constitute a particular s emantic category, or because they benefit from special brain mechanism s devoted to the production of ''automatic speech'', or because they a re the elementary buildings blocks of speech during the production of complex numerals.