Density pervades: An analysis of phonological neighbourhood density effects in aphasic speakers with different types of naming impairment

We investigated the influence of phonological neighbourhood density (PND) on the performance of aphasic speakers whose naming impairments differentially implicate phonological or semantic stages of lexical access. A word comes from a dense phonological neighbourhood if many words sound like it. Limited evidence suggests that higher density facilitates naming in aphasic speakers, as it does in healthy speakers. Using well-controlled stimuli, Experiment 1 confirmed the influence of PND on accuracy and phonological error rates in two aphasic speakers with phonological processing deficits. In Experiments 2 and 3, we extended the investigation to an aphasic speaker who is prone to semantic errors, indicating a semantic deficit and/or a deficit in the mapping from semantics to words. This individual had higher accuracy, and fewer semantic errors, in naming targets from high-than from low-density neighbourhoods. It is argued that the Results provide strong support for interactive approaches to lexical access, where reverberatory feedback between word-and phoneme-level lexical representations not only facilitates phonological level processes but also privileges the selection of a target word over its semantic competitors.