The Influence of Phonological Context on Aphasic Sound Errors: A Case Study
Date
1999
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Linguistics
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Thesis (B.A.)
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en_US
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Abstract
This study explored the influence of phonological context on the sound errors produced in
narrative speech by a fluent aphasic subject, RWB. At the time of the study, RWB was a 56 year-old male diagnosed with Wernicke's aphasia as a result of a left temporo-parietal stroke two
months earlier. The subject was asked to watch and relate a series of video-taped movie segments.
From a total of 42 narrative samples, 93 sound errors were extracted for contextual analysis.
Perseveratory or anticipatory contextual windows were defined for each error as the number of
phonemes before or after the error within which a phoneme or group of phonemes corresponding
to the error should occur by chance factors alone fifty percent of the time. Significantly more than
half the errors had to have potential sources within perseveratory or anticipatory windows to
establish context effects in RWB's corpus. RWB's errors had potential sources in anticipatory
windows at about chance levels, while perseverations occurred less often than expected by chance.
Failure to demonstrate significant context effects in RWB's sound error corpus suggests that the
contextual interaction widely acknowledged to underlie nonaphasic errors may not be a significant
cause of errors in all aphasic speakers. These findings have important implications for the relation
between aphasic and nonaphasic language production systems.