ABSTRACT
Two tasks that are commonly administered to aphasic patients in order to assess their ability to produce spoken words are auditory repetition (in which participants must repeat single words that they hear) and picture naming. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two different theoretical accounts of the relationship between an individual’s performance on these two tasks. Is it possible to predict accurately the number and nature of the errors that a patient will make on a test of auditory repetition from their picture naming performance for the same set of items, as has been assumed by Dell, Schwartz, Martin, Saffran, and Gagnon (1997) and by Foygel and Dell (2000)? Alternatively, is it also necessary to take account of the individual’s nonword repetition ability, as has been claimed by Hanley and Kay (1997) and Hanley, Kay, and Edwards (2002)? The answer to this question should provide important evidence as to whether a nonlexical route is involved in the repetition of familiar words.
