However this suggestion involves the visual word form system maintaining its efficacy, even in the presence of widespread dysfunction at lower levels of the visual system.
Irrespective of whether the observed reading is attributable to preservation of the word form and/or aspects of parallel letter processing, the performance of these two PCA patients represents an impressive demonstration of the resilience and efficiency of the reading system in the face of profound visual dysfunction. We would like to thank FOL and CLA for the patience and good humour during the completion of this study. This work was undertaken at UCLH/UCL who received a proportion of funding from the Department of Health’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Dasatinib concentration Biomedical Research Centres funding scheme. The Dementia Research Centre is an Alzheimer’s Research UK Co-ordinating Centre. This work was supported by an Alzheimer’s Research UK Senior Research Fellowship to SC. JDW is supported by a Wellcome Trust Senior
Clinical Fellowship (Grant No. 091673/Z/10/Z). “
“The majority of people with aphasia have difficulty in finding or producing words and this can be a significant cause of breakdown in conversation (e.g., Perkins et al., 1999). There is a large and growing body of evidence demonstrating that intervention learn more can help improve word retrieval or word production (see Nickels, 2002 for
a review). However, the majority of interventions result in change primarily on treated items (e.g., Abel et al., 2005; Fillingham et al., 2006; Laganaro et al., 2003; Wisenburn and Mahoney, 2009). Given these fairly consistent findings a key question of both clinical and theoretical importance arises: what pattern(/s) of strengths and difficulties leads to generalisation to untreated items? The answer to this question may inform clinical practice and our understanding of how intervention is altering word retrieval/production. There are several models of ‘speech production’, more recently and accurately termed ‘language production’ ranging from classic ‘box and arrow’ models (Ellis and Young, 1988; Kay et al., 1992) to connectionist models (Dell et al., 1997; Goldrick PtdIns(3,4)P2 and Rapp, 2002; Levelt et al., 1999). While the models vary considerably in their specification, in relation to retrieving single words for production, all require the following three stages: (1) Lexical-semantic processing or accessing word meaning (sometimes termed ‘lexical semantics’ and usually distinguished from ‘conceptual semantics’) In this paper ‘word (or, for connected speech, language) production’ will be used to refer to all three stages of processing. Thus, ‘word production’ incorporates retrieving the word’s meaning and form and abstract phonological encoding.