Marie-Pierre de Partz de Courtray

The Isolation of Numerals at the Semantic Level

In this study, we examine the case of a patient (NM) who could comprehend and produce numerals despite impairment on comprehension tasks and a high degree of anemia for other categories of words. It will be claimed that NM suffered from an impairment to the semantic system affecting all categories except numerals and the series of days and months. The case of a patient presenting with the exact reverse dissociation has been described a few years ago by Cipolotti et al. (Brain 1991; 114: 619-37). We conclude that NMs pattern of performance provides evidence that numerals constitute a relevant and perhaps a distinct category at the semantic level.

A direct processing route to translate words from the first to the second language: Evidence from a case of a bilingual aphasic

How are the lexical representations corresponding to each of the languages used by a bilingual individual related within the lexical processing system(s)? Current theories of the bilingual lexical system share the assumption that the lexico-semantic level of representation and processing is common to both languages. However, there are disagreements among models on whether and how the word form representations in the first (L1) and second language (L2) are inter-connected. According to Kirsner, Lalor, and Hird (1993), only cognate forms (e.g., the French word /tabl/ and the English word /teIbl/, both meaning ‘‘table’’) are inter-connected within the bilingual lexicon, whereas Kroll and Stewart (1994) argued that the existence of crosslanguage connections was not dependent on the words being cognates or not. Thus, the ‘‘revised hierarchical model’’ (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) assumes direct connections between each L1 and L2 corresponding word forms, although L2 to L1 connections are supposed to be stronger than L1 to L2’s. Furthermore, contrary to theories of lexical processing in monolinguals (e.g., Caramazza & Hillis, 1990), these theories do not draw any explicit distinction between input and output lexical representations and processing. Therefore, it is unclear at or between which levels are connections between word forms needed to be assumed to account for the lexical performance of bilinguals. Here, we report the case of a French/English bilingual aphasic patient whose pattern of performance in naming and translation provides evidence relevant to these issues.

Pattern of letter substitutions in a case of acquired dysgraphia: The influence of visuospatial and stroke-feature similarity

Letter substitution errors have commonly been reported in various peripheral writing disorders (Margolin & Goodman-Schulman, 1992). In particular, such errors were reported in cases of a deficit ascribed to the graphemic buffer component, a temporary memory store holding abstract grapheme representations, or to postbuffer components involved in assigning a specific letter form to grapheme representations. Rapp and Caramazza (1997) showed that the letter substitution errors produced by two patients with a graphemic buffer deficit were not explicable in terms of stroke-feature similarity between the target letter and the error. In contrast, the letter substitution errors produced by two other dysgraphic patients whose damage was at postbuffer loci, bore a physical similarity to the intended target. Physical similarity was based on the features of the letters’ component strokes rather than on the visuospatial characteristics of the letters. We report on an additional case of a patient presenting with peripheral writing disorders, whose letter substitution errors presented a distinct pattern of target/error similarity, according to the contextual vs. noncontextual source of the error.