The assignment of word stress in oral reading: Evidence from a case of acquired dyslexia

Patient CLB is severely impaired in naming familiar objects and in writing to dictation and repeating familiar and novel words. His output in all these tasks is jargonaphasic. By contrast, his ability fo convert print to sound at the segmental level is remarkably spared. He showed no difficulty in reading nonwords and those words to which stress may be assigned on the basis of syllabic structure. In reading aloud words with lexically assigned stress (but not words with syllabically assigned stress), however, CLB produced a large number of segmentally correct, but suprasegmentally incorrect responses (e.g. sabato (Saturday) → /sa'bato/ instead of /'sabato/). Since his ability to use orthographic information in lexical decision and in comprehension tasks was only very mildly impaired, his stress assignment errors would seem to be the result of damage to the phonological output lexicon. This pattern of performance is interpreted as support for the hypothesis that the phonological representations computed in speech production do not merely consist of ordered sequences of phonemes, but consist instead of multidimensional representations that specify (among other things) syllabic structure.