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Revue de neuropsychologie

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An architecture of the phonetico-phonological disorders in French aphasia: From segments to syllables Volume 9, issue 2, Avril-Mai-Juin 2017

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Author
Université de Nantes,
Département des sciences du langage,
Laboratoire de linguistique,
UFR lettres et langages,
UMR 6310,
Chemin de la Censive-du-Tertre,
BP 811227,
44312 Nantes cedex 3, France
* Correspondance

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of the phonological disorders in French aphasic speakers. From a study based on the production of consonantal sequences among 20 aphasic speakers, we show that the repair strategies applied during a phonological deficit are the result of the phonological constraints of a language. Furthermore, preliminary studies in neuropsycholinguistics [1] show a contrast between the transformations carried out during a Broca aphasia and a conduction aphasia. The authors propose that the nature of aphasia generates different phonological patterns. Some phonological contexts are more prone to the paraphasia and are particularly affected. We conducted an experimental study to evaluate the nature of this contrast using a denomination task with 40 items containing different consonantal sequences. We examined a total of 20 aphasic speakers among which 7 speakers suffering from Broca aphasia, 6 speakers suffering from Wernicke aphasia, 4 speakers suffering from conduction aphasia and 3 speakers suffering from transcortical aphasia. Our findings show that the detected paraphasias are far from being random. They are reduced to five kinds: substitution, deletion, epenthesis, metathesis and total reduction. Some syllabic positions and contexts are prone to certain types of paraphasias. Thus, the coda is mainly deleted whereas the onset is sometimes substituted. Metathesis and epenthesis also appear in some aphasic speakers’ productions. These results reveal an interaction between segments, syllables and position, and open the questions for both formal phonology and neuropsycholinguistics. In sum, in addition to the nature of aphasia, many factors play a central role in the application of the repair strategies. Our research provides two further objectives: on the one hand, redefining and explaining the phonological contexts mainly affected by aphasia, and, on the other hand, understanding if the type of repair strategies depends on the nature of aphasia.