Reading aloud in jargonaphasia: an unusual dissociation in speech output

A patient is described who showed several dissociations between oral and written language processing after bilateral retrorolandic vascular lesion. Dissociation was firstly between abolished auditory comprehension and preserved written comprehension and then involved confrontation naming, clearly superior in the written modality. The third striking dissociation involved oral output; spontaneous speech, although fluent and well articulated, consisted of neologistic jargon, while reading aloud was clearly superior though not perfect. Data are discussed with reference to a cognitive model of word processing. The pattern of dissociation in word production may be due to a failure in retrieving the phonological word form from the semantic system.