Lexical meaning: a case report, some striking phenomena, theoretical implications.
A case of global aphasia is reported. In spite of severe impairments in auditory comprehension, as testified by failure in matching spoken words to pictured objects, the patient performed significantly higher than chance level in sorting out the odd item from a spoken list of semantically related words. This preserved ability to achieve the semantic processing of "non-understood" spoken words in the given task is compared to similar experimental data from the study of written word comprehension in dyslexic patients or normal subjects. Taken together, these data call for a procedural approach of the lexicon. In this theoretical framework, lexical meaning should not only be stored and retrieved but it should be computed at each word occurrence.
D000328:Adult; D001037:Aphasia / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012660:Semantics; D013067:Speech Perception; D013068:Speech Production Measurement