“L” is for tiger: Effects of phonological (mis)cueing on picture naming in semantic aphasia

Semantic aphasia (SA) refers to a subset of aphasic patients who exhibit multimodal semantic deficits (Jefferies, E., & Lambon Ralph, M. (2006). Semantic impairment in stroke aphasia vs semantic dementia: a case-series comparison. Brain, 129(8), 2132–2147). Consistent with their underlying semantic control deficit, SA picture naming accuracy can be improved considerably with a correct phonological cue. The performance of normal individuals in the tempo picture naming paradigm reveals an increased impact of both correct and incorrect phonological cueing, and it has been suggested that this technique reduces resources available for semantic control in neurologically-intact participants (Hodgson, C., & Lambon Ralph, M. (2008). Mimicking aphasic semantic naming errors in normal speech production: Evidence from a novel experimental paradigm. Brain and Language, 104(1), 89–101.). We tested this hypothesis by considering the impact of both correct and incorrect phonological cues on picture naming in a case series of SA patients, using exactly the same items as those presented to normal participants for tempo naming. The results confirmed the positive effect of correct cues and revealed for the first time the negative effects of category co-ordinate miscues amongst these patients in both overall accuracy and semantic error rates. The implications of our results for current speech production models are considered.