title: Density pervades: an analysis of phonological neighbourhood density effects in aphasic speakers with different types of naming impairment.
abstract: We investigated the influence of phonological neighbourhood density (PND) on the performance of aphasic speakers whose naming impairments differentially implicate phonological or semantic stages of lexical access. A word comes from a dense phonological neighbourhood if many words sound like it. Limited evidence suggests that higher density facilitates naming in aphasic speakers, as it does in healthy speakers. Using well-controlled stimuli, Experiment 1 confirmed the influence of PND on accuracy and phonological error rates in two aphasic speakers with phonological processing deficits. In Experiments 2 and 3, we extended the investigation to an aphasic speaker who is prone to semantic errors, indicating a semantic deficit and/or a deficit in the mapping from semantics to words. This individual had higher accuracy, and fewer semantic errors, in naming targets from high- than from low-density neighbourhoods. It is argued that the Results provide strong support for interactive approaches to lexical access, where reverberatory feedback between word- and phoneme-level lexical representations not only facilitates phonological level processes but also privileges the selection of a target word over its semantic competitors.
authors: Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, Elkins Park, PA 19027, USA. middleer@einstein.edu
authors: Erica L
authors: EL
authors: Middleton
authors: Myrna F
authors: MF
authors: Schwartz
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000849:Anomia / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D018886:Aphasia, Conduction / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D012660:Semantics; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology