Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 65, Issue 1, December 1997, Pages 1-13
Cognition

The representation of stress: evidence from an aphasic patient

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(97)00024-3Get rights and content

Abstract

We report the case of an aphasic patient who, following an acquired lesion involving the left temporo-parietal cortex, produced many word stress errors in spontaneous speech, naming of objects and reading aloud. The stress impairment concerned exclusively words in which stress was unpredictable on the basis of syllabic structure, and was equally severe in naming and reading aloud. Errors were significantly more frequent in the cases of words with stress on the antepenultimate syllable, and of low frequency words. There was a high consistency between errors in naming and reading aloud. These findings suggest that stress representation can be selectively impaired after brain damage; we hypothesise that a partial disorder at the level of the form lexicon, involving the representation of lexical stress, can account for most of the features of the patient's performance.

Introduction

Errors in stress assignment have been infrequently reported in language disorders. The production of stress errors in reading has been observed both in developmental dyslexics (cf. Coltheart et al., 1983) and in patients with acquired dyslexia (cf. Marshall and Newcombe, 1973). The first in-depth study of the quantitative and qualitative aspects of stress assignment errors in oral reading, and of their implications for models of the reading process, can be found in a case study by Miceli and Caramazza (1993). Their patient (CLB) was severely jargonaphasic in all oral and written production tasks, but had a remarkably preserved ability to convert print to sound at the segmental level. He could read aloud both words and non-words; however, in reading words with lexically-assigned stress, he produced many segmentally correct but suprasegmentally incorrect responses, i.e. número read as numı́ro.

The stress errors in reading aloud have been considered to reflect reliance on a non-lexical route in reading: in languages such as Italian, where the orthography-to-phonology matching is relatively transparent only at the segmental level, stress errors may be considered as the hallmark of phonological reading. Furthermore, Miceli and Caramazza (1993)have suggested that, since stress assignment depends on the syllabic structure of words, the errors might provide evidence about the type of representations computed in speech production. In particular, since CLB did not produce errors on words with syllabically assigned stress, it might be concluded that syllabic information is available in the phonological representations computed for production via the non-lexical route.

In the case of CLB, word stress errors were observed only in oral reading; the severe impairment in all other production tasks (spontaneous speech, oral naming, repetition) prevented any detailed assessment. In this paper we report the case of a patient who, among other linguistic impairments, had as a striking feature of his phonetic performance the profuse production of word stress errors, not only in reading aloud but also in other oral production tasks, including spontaneous speech and picture naming.

Section snippets

Stress in Italian

The languages of the world differ in the way stress is assigned to individual words in pronunciation. In some languages, the location of stress is predictable either, as in French, because it invariably falls on the same syllable with respect to an edge of the word or, as in Latin, because, in spite of the fact that stress does not invariably fall on a certain syllable, a rule determines its location on the basis of syllable weight. In other languages (e.g. Italian) stress may fall on different

Case report

GM is a 28-year-old right-handed male with 8 years of education and a history of chronic heroin addiction. During a street fight he received a stab wound to the left zygomatic region; after 3 days he experienced the sudden onset of headache and language disturbances; upon admission to a neurosurgical service, aphasia and mild right hemiparesis were observed. A CT scan showed a haemorrhage in the region of the left temporal pole. Surgical evacuation of the haematoma was followed by severe

Word reading, picture naming, repetition

Stress assignment in polysyllabic words was systematically investigated in GM's speech with: reading aloud of 181 words (169+12 containing stressed diphthongs); oral naming of a series of 202 pictures (190+12 containing stressed diphthongs). Of these, 181 corresponded to the words used for reading.

The naming corpus corresponded to 151 three-syllable words and 51 four- and five-syllable words. All the words were underived. In 36 words of the corpus stress was predictable, in that the penultimate

Predictable and unpredictable word stress

To summarise, GM produced many stress errors only when the stress location could not be inferred from the syllabic structure of the word. As mentioned in the introduction, errors of stress assignment in reading tasks have usually been considered to reflect reliance on a non-lexical route in reading (cf. Miceli and Caramazza, 1993). It is clear that this interpretation cannot account fully for GM's performance, as his stress errors were not limited to reading tasks. A comparable amount of errors

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Maria Cotelli and Francesco Zorat for their help in data analysis, and two anonymous reviewers of Cognition for stimulating comments and suggestions.

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