ABSTRACT
An important element in the microgenetic theory of language processing concerns the prediction of semantic to phonological flow. This prediction has found support in studies of deep dyslexia (Coltheart, Patterson, & Marshall, 1980), where patients with generally large left hemisphere lesions, who are unable to derive phonology from print, show semantic errors in reading, especially for concrete nouns. Such patients extract meaning from the word form even though they cannot process the word phonetically, suggesting a prephonological stage of lexical meaning. Similar phenomena in the auditory modality have been reported (Morton, 1980). There are reports of ability to point to semantic associates of an orally presented target on a forced-choice paradigm in patients with cortical or word deafness who are otherwise unable to point to the correct object.
