Imageability and Category-specificity

Abstract

In this paper, we report the case of DrO, a patient who has been described as having a selective problem understanding the meaning of abstract words in the auditory modality. We test this claim by means of an on-line semantic priming task, comparing the automatic activation of semantic information in both the auditory and visual modalities. Although DrO showed priming for both abstract and concrete words in the visual modality, there was only priming for concrete words in the auditory modality. However, DrO's reaction times (RTs) and errors in the auditory priming study suggested thathe mighthave a generalised auditory processing impairment. We tested and confirmed this hypothesis in a series of further studies. We propose an account of why a general auditory processing impairment would affect abstract words more than concrete words by appealing to an auditory analogue of Plaut and Shallice's (1993) recent computational model of deep dyslexia.