Effects of lexical stress on aphasic word production

This paper is the first to investigate systematically the effects on aphasi c word production of manipulating position of lexical stress in bisyllabic words using a repetition task. Seven patients (of a case series of 13) made significantly more errors when repeating words with a weak-strong stress p attern (e.g. ca 'noe, hu'mane) than when repeating words with a strong-weak stress pattern (e.g. 'mercy,'habit). Characteristic errors on words with a weak-strong stress pattern involved omission of the unstressed syllable (e .g. romance-->mance) and reduplication of syllable initial consonants (e.g. romance-->momance). No patient made an error of stress assignment on words with a weak-strong stress pattern. These results are interpreted within th e framework of Levelt's model of spoken word production. Although this mode l can account for the omission of unstressed initial syllables, it remains a challenge for this land other) models to explain the co-occurrence of bot h omission and reduplicative errors.