Converging evidence for the interaction of semantic and sublexical phonological information in accessing lexical representations for spoken output

Detailed studies of naming, reading, and comprehension by three brain-damaged patients are reported. The three subjects had different patterns of performance across lexical tasks, which are best explicated by proposing, for each case, separate loci of damage to one or more components of the lexical system. Nevertheless, all three patients showed better oral reading than would be expected on the basis of either their demonstrated abilities in lexical-semantic processing or their demonstrated abilities in sublexical orthography-to-phonology conversion. The disproportionately intact oral reading in each of these subjects can be explained either by proposing a nonsemantic “direct route” of reading and/or by proposing that at least partial semantic information interacts with at least partial sublexical phonological information to access lexico-phonological representations for output in the task of oral reading. Evidence favouring the latter hypothesis was provided by studies of the subjects’ performance on a variety of tasks in which partial semantic information and/or partial or complete sublexical phonological information were presented to facilitate oral production. Also, further analyses of the patients’ oral reading as a function of complete vs. incomplete vs. abolished comprehension of printed words, and as a function of orthographic regularity, were consistent with specific predictions that follow from the hypothesis that (even partial) semantic information and (even partial) sublexical phonological information interact to access lexico-phonological representations for output.