Abstract
The case was a 69 year-old right-handed female who suffered from fluent aphasia following left temporoparietal infarction. She made no errors in word repetition and word reading tasks : only in oral naming tasks, she produced various paraphasias and neologisms with verbal self-correction, commonly referred as “conduites d'approche”.
We classified her oral naming task errors into six categories (mixed, formal, phonological, semantic, or irrelevant pharaphasias, or neologisms) using three indexes as follows : 1) lexicality, 2) semantic relevancy, and 3) phonological relevancy. For the sake of objectivity, “index of phonemic similarity” was applied to judge phonological relevancy.
It is notable that she produced a significant amount of non-word errors (phonological paraphasias and neologisms) in which syllabic and prosodic structures of the target words were preserved even if segments were pronounced incorrectly. She also made some non-word errors in which elements of different words were combined into one. Furthermore, she produced real-word errors phonologically related to targets (formal paraphasias and mixed paraphasias).
We suspected that she had difficulty retrieving the phonological form of an item. Specifically, she may have had a deficit to spell out segmental information while preserving functions to spell out syllabic and prosodic structure. Various non-word errors which occurred in oral naming tasks may have resulted from a struggle to fill out a “frame” composed of syllabic and prosodic structure with appropriate segments. Occurrences of real-word errors phonologically related to targets and non-word errors produced by combining elements of different words into one indicate that the semantic and phonological level of a word may interact with one another for retrieval of the word.
