READING OF LEXICALLY STRESSED WORDS BY ITALIAN APHASIC PATIENTS - A RETROSPECTIVE STUDY

This retrospective study investigated whether there is evidence of a 3 rd reading mechanism in a transparent orthography such as Italian, whe re (nearly) all words can be read through the sublexical route but str ess cannot always be assigned by orthography-to-phonology rules. The p resence and frequency of stress errors in lexically stressed words in 16 aphasic patients with impaired reading comprehension of those same words was checked. Nine patients were reexamined months later. Notwith standing impaired reading comprehension, none of the patients made str ess errors at first examination. At follow-up, all patients showed imp rovement of reading comprehension and only 2 patients still had better preserved oral reading. The authors concluded that even in transparen t orthographies such as Italian, the noninteractive dual-route model i s inadequate for explaining all patterns of reading performances. In n onprogressive aphasias, reading comprehension can recover in a large n umber of patients, reducing the amplitude of the dissociation between reading aloud and reading comprehension and reducing the number of pat ients showing this dissociation.