Selective impairment of lexical stress assignment in an Italian-speaking aphasic patient

Psycholinguistic speech production models assume that lexical stress is stored and accessed separately during phonological encoding. We address the questions of the storage and computation of lexical stress in a case study of an Italian-speaking patient with an impairment of lexical stress assignment in naming, reading, and repeating single words. The patient's stress error pattern and his performance on tasks examining lexical stress in perception suggest an impairment in the retrieval of the stress pattern of irregular words. In contrast, his assignment of stress to nonstored phonological forms suggests that the computation of stress is unimpaired.