A neural network simulation method of aphasic naming errors: Properties and behaviour

Abstract

Aphasia is a language disorder caused by brain damage. Naming errors which are common in aphasia are applied to reveal the type and the effects of a disorder. Naming in this research field refers to psycholinguistic tests where a subject is asked to say the name of an object presented as a picture to him or her. We have earlier presented a simulation model on the basis of neural networks [1,2]. The model is further developed here, and its properties and behaviour are described in the present paper. The simulation model includes a bounded set of Finnish words in their base lingual form. The principle of activation spreading is used to process naming errors with the method to simulate actual aphasic errors. All computation in the model is executed with words as text or with textual components of words, although the system processes naming errors, i.e. human speech.