Written Word Comprehension Research Articles

Neuropsychological studies of verbal semantic systems

The selective impairment of verbal comprehension in patients with cerebral lesions provides a powerful and direct source of evidence regarding the properties of verbal semantic systems. Word frequency is shown to be an important determinant of performance for both spoken and written word comprehension, indicating that the aphasic patient may have a quantitative reduction in capacity according to task difficulty. But this cannot be an exhaustive account. Evidence for the vulnerability of subordinate as compared with superordinate information is reported, which it is argued indicates that the semantic representations of single words are hierarchical or ordered in their degree of specificity. Finally, evidence is presented for selective impairments of the comprehension of words from particular semantic categories. Double dissociations of deficits of the concrete-abstract and of objects-non-object concepts are reported. It is argued that the verbal semantic meaning systems are categorically organized

Part of speech and phonological form implied in written-word comprehension: Evidence from homograph disambiguation by normal and aphasic subjects

A sentence construction experiment examining the effect of part of speech and phonological form in written-word comprehension is reported. Normal and aphasic subjects had to write sentences incorporating a given word pair, one word was a homograph (e.g., “bank”) whose meaning was context-biased by the other (e.g., “money”/“river”). The effect of three psycholinguistic factors on subjects' performance was questioned: (i) The relative frequency of one meaning of the homograph as compared to the other meaning; (ii) The lexical/syntactic ambiguity (“ball”/“can”); (iii) The same/different phonological forms of the two meanings (“fair”/“bass”). The results are discussed in the framework of a model in which multiple special-purpose procedures are involved in normal processing, some of them being differentially impaired by brain disease in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics.

Lexical Meaning: A Case Report, Some Striking Phenomena, Theoretical Implications

A case of global aphasia is reported. In spite of severe impairments in auditory comprehension, as testified by failure in matching spoken words to pictured objects, the patient performed significantly higher than chance level in sorting out the odd item from a spoken list of semantically related words. This preserved ability to achieve the semantic processing of “non-understood” spoken words in the given task is compared to similar experimental data from the study of written word comprehension in dyslexic patients or normal subjects. Taken together, these data call for a procedural approach of the lexicon. In this theoretical framework, lexical meaning should not only be stored and retrieved but it should be computed at each word occurrence.