WHY DOES MONITORING FAIL IN JARGON APHASIA - COMPREHENSION, JUDGMENT,AND THERAPY EVIDENCE

Many people with jargon aphasia seem unaware of their speech disorder. The first section of this paper reports data from four subjects which indicate that self-monitoring can fail even when subjects' input skil ls are apparently adequate to detect their errors. Explanations for th is dissociation have attributed monitoring failure to a deficit in aud itory feedback, or to a resource limitation which prevents concurrent speaking and monitoring. Section 2 reports a series of naming and judg ing experiments with one of the subjects which rule out these explanat ions. These show that the subject can detect his neologisms when he is repeating, but not when he is naming. These results suggest that his monitoring difficulties arise when he is accessing phonology from sema ntics. Section 3 presents a study which supports this inference, since it shows that semantically focused intervention yields improvements i n self-monitoring. It is concluded (1) that monitoring failure can ari se from deficits within the production process which preclude comparis on of actual with intended output, and (2) that this deficit is best e xplained within a connectionist model in which monitoring is performed by feedback mechanisms in the word production process. (C) 1998 Acade mic Press.