The processing of printed language by aphasic adults: some phonological and syntactic effects

Eight aphasic and eight brain-damaged nonaphasic patients silently "read" a short passage while performing an internal search for specified consonant letters of varying phonological and syntactic salience. The nonaphasic patients showed the phonological and syntactic effects customarily achieved by normal readers. For example, they were more likely to find a letter if it were pronounced than if it were silent, and they were more likely to find a letter if it were in a content word than in a function word. The aphasics had reliable phonological effects but no observable syntactic effects. Those aphasics with relatively large phonological effects performed better on a separate task requiring the oral reading of isolated words. For reading theory, the primary message from this study is that phonological recoding may occur between word recognition and the completion of semantic analysis, and that recoding may not by itself be sufficient to reading for meaning. For aphasia theory, the main implication of this study is that aphasics read by applying the appropriate phonological strategies, but that such strategies are limited in the face of ineffective syntactic and semantic processing, as occurs in aphasia.