BACKGROUND Previous studies have shown that in semi-spontaneous speech, individuals with Broca's and anomic aphasia produce relatively many direct speech constructions. It has been claimed that in 'healthy' communication direct speech constructions contribute to the liveliness, and indirectly to the comprehensibility, of speech. AIMS To examine the effects of the occurrence of direct speech c...

Paradigmatic cases of proper name anomia and proper name selective sparing are reviewed from relevant neuropsychological literature. Available evidence supports the existence of functionally and anatomically distinct retrieval pathways for the categories of proper and common names. An information processing model whose main feature lies in the relative independence within the semantic-conceptua...

Are the sources of ethnocentrism rather more sociological than psychological in nature? In order to answer this question, we review a classic debate between sociologists and psychologists. From this debate we distil two implicit theoretical models which are transposed into explicit and competitive models. A number of lacunas are filled with recent theoretical contributions and, subsequently, th...

This paper reviews the performance of 10 previously reported patients who have deficits in recalling the names of people, but whose performance in recalling common names is relatively well preserved. An analysis of face naming ability in these 10 patients reveals that the proportion of faces that a patient can name is closely related to whether or not the patient has a retrieval problem that al...

Matthew A. Lambon Ralph, Karalyn Patterson and David C. Plaut Neuroscience & Aphasia Research Unit, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, UK Department of Psychology and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon Uni...

Fluency is a long-debated notion in linguistics, as it plays crucial role second language acquisition (SLA) research and applied linguistics. Starting from some recent discussions on the topic, this paper examines whether aphasiology could benefit insights these fields of study. First, we will summarize most relevant views fluency concerning aphasic speech. As see, every account has two common ...