Effects of lexical stress on aphasic word production

This paper is the first to investigate systematically the effects on aphasic word production of manipulating position of lexical stress in bisyllabic words using a repetition task. Seven patients (of a case series of 13) made significantly more errors when repeating words with a weak-strong stress pattern (e.g. ca'noe, hu'mane) than when repeating words with a strong-weak stress pattern (e.g. 'mercy, 'habit). Characteristic errors on words with a weak-strong stress pattern involved omission of the unstressed syllable (e.g. romance→mance) and reduplication of syllable initial consonants (e.g. romance→momance). No patient made an error of stress assignment on words with a weak-strong stress pattern. These results are interpreted within the framework of Levelt's model of spoken word production. Although this model can account for the omission of unstressed initial syllables, it remains a challenge for this (and other) models to explain the co-occurrence of both omission and reduplicative errors.