From three to 3: a differential analysis of skills in transcoding quantities between patients with Broca's and...

A psycholinguistic investigation into the ability of aphasic patients to transcode integer quantities from written numeral forms into digit strings is reported. Broca's aphasics experienced specific difficulties in handling the grammatical structure underlying word order and also, on the word level, the bound morphemes relative to the root morphemes. Wernicke's aphasics seemed to have lexical troubles reflected by some purely lexical confusions together with serial order disturbances. These findings support the hypothesis of differential preserved/impaired skills according to type of aphasia, but having a high level of generality since they appear in classic linguistic tasks as well as in the domain of numbers.