Classical anemia: a neuropsychological perspective on speech production

We present data collected from two anemic aphasics. Thorough assessment of comprehension, oral reading and repetition revealed no underlying impairmen ts suggesting that both patients were examples of classical anomia-word-fin ding difficulties without impaired semantics or phonology. We describe a se ries of experiments in which the degree of anemia was both increased and de creased, by cueing or priming with either a semantically related word or th e target item. One of the patients also presented with an 'acquired' tip-of -the-tongue phenomenon. He was able to indicate with a high-degree of accur acy the syllable length of the target, and whether or not it was a compound word. Neither patient could provide the first sound;letter. The data are d iscussed in terms of discrete two-stage models of speech production, an int eractive-activation theory and a distributed model in which the positive an d negative computational consequences of the arbitrary relationship between sound and meaning are emphasised. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All right s reserved.