ABSTRACT
Former studies from our research group have shown a discrepancy between the errors produced by Broca's aphasics and those produced by conduction aphasics in repetition tasks. This discrepancy was interpreted as the manifestation of (a) a “phonetic” deficit in the patients belonging to the former group and (b) a processing deficit affecting, possibly among other things, the serial ordering of the phonemic units in the latter group.
Within the context of this chapter, we compare the patterns of errors observed in repetition tasks to errors produced by the same patients in oral reading of the same lexical items as those which constituted the repetition test. Results suggest that (a) there is indeed a qualitative discrepancy between Broca's aphasics and conduction aphasics in both tasks under question, (b) such a difference implies the existence of different pathogenetic causal factors in the two clinical patient groups. A tentative synthetic psycholinguistic model is proposed (derived from Garrett's, Shattuck-Hufnagel's, and MacNeilage's models of speech production) in an attempt to account for the pathogenesis of all phenomena (and discrepancies) observed in both groups of patients and in both tasks.
