Word-meaning deafness: A phonological-semantic dissociation

Abstract

Word-meaning deafness represents an auditory comprehension disturbance that is due to a dissociation between accurate phonological and semantic information. The patient is unable to understand a spoken word that he can repeat and can understand when read. Two cases of word-meaning deafness are presented to demonstrate that this disorder can be due either to a breakdown prior to the accessing of stored phonological representations (“pre-access”) or to a breakdown following the accessing of stored phonological representations (“post-access”).