IMAGEABILITY AND CATEGORY-SPECIFICITY

In this paper, we report the case of DrO, a patient who has been descr ibed as having a selective problem understanding the meaning of abstra ct words in the auditory modality. We test this claim by means of an o n-line semantic priming task, comparing the automatic activation of se mantic information in both the auditory and visual modalities. Althoug h DrO showed priming for both abstract and concrete words in the visua l modality, there was only priming for concrete words in the auditory modality. However, DrO's reaction times (RTs) and errors in the audito ry priming study suggested that he might have a generalised auditory p rocessing impairment. We tested and confirmed this hypothesis in a ser ies of further studies. We propose an account of why a general auditor y processing impairment would affect abstract words more than concrete words by appealing to an auditory analogue of Plaut and Shallice's (1 993) recent computational model of deep dyslexia.