firam (1983), 106, 735-744

FROM 4 TO FOUR
A SUPPLEMENT TO 'FROM THREE TO 3'

by XAVIER SERON and G E R A R D D E L O C H E

(From the Neuropsychology Department, Cliniques Universitaires St Luc,
10 Avenue Hippocrate, UCL/1350 B-1200 Bruxelles, Belgique, and
INSERM U.84, 47 Boulevardde VHopital, F-75651 Paris Cedex 13, France)

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SUMMARY
The psycholinguistic investigation of the ability of patients with Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia to
transcode quantities from the ideographic digital coding system to alphabetical numerals parallels our
previous study on the reverse transcoding task. The results support the generality of differential
impairment of syntactic/nonsyntactic skills in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia.

INTRODUCTION
In a previous study we investigated the abilities of two groups of aphasic patients to
transcode integer quantities from alphabetically written forms (numerals) to Arabic
digit strings (numbers) (Deloche and Seron, 1982). The one-to-one correspondence
between the two coding systems, the small number of lexical primitives, the
simplicity of the grammars, and the frequent occurrence of the task in everyday life
for writing cheques, were why we chose this domain to investigate the pattern of
dissolution of aphasic subjects' performances in transcoding tasks theoretically
equivalent to translations from one language or modality to another. The results
indicated that Broca's (and more particularly those subjects with agrammatism) and
Wernicke's aphasics were differentially impaired in a way that paralleled the general
dissociation of linguistic abilities of the two types of aphasia along the syntactic/
semantic dimensions. It could thus be tentatively concluded that, despite its formal
autonomy with reference to language, the alphabetical coding system for quantities
and the psycholinguistic procedures of that system are not disrupted independently
of the other linguistic skills. This conclusion seems at variance with classic
observations according to which the reading of numbers is often preserved in alexic
syndromes (Hecaen and Kremin, 1976). As indicated by Coltheart (1980), the
'number preservation' effect found with ideographically written forms (numbers)
does not seem to have been systematically investigated in the alphabetical coding
system. Even Hecaen and Kremin (1976) did not actually compare their aphasic
patients' performances in the two scripts since only digital forms were used in their
study. The results of our previous study seemed to support the hypothesis of a
general disorder affecting the manipulation of hierarchical structures per se in
736 XAVIER SERON AND GERARD DELOCHE

Broca's aphasics, that is, the structures that underlie the arrangement of words in
sentences, the arrangement of lexical primitives in numeral forms, or the organiza-
tion of branches and nodes in trees as reported by Grossman (1980).
In the present study, we are concerned with the ability of Broca's and Wernicke's
aphasics to transcode integer quantities from the digital to the alphabetical system.
This task is the reverse of that used in our previous study but, given the peculiarities
of the coding systems and particularly the differences of serial ordering constraints,
the two tasks are far from being simple inverses of each other, as has been shown by
Power and Longuet-Higgins (1978), who developed transcoding algorithms in the
two directions. The present paper continues our previous study by analysing the
subjects' performance when handling a task that involves different psycholinguistic
procedures that cannot be simply inverted and that operate on essentially different
material, namely, ideographic versus alphabetical scripts (see Besner and Coltheart,

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1979, for the relevance of this distinction).
In both studies, the subjects' responses, either correct or erroneous, are
considered to be produced by neurolinguistic mechanisms whose procedures belong
to the normal cognitive system. Our interest is mainly in the disorganization of the
set of psycholinguistic procedures, their overgeneralization, and their individual
degeneration. In both studies, too, the pattern of dissolution of Broca's and
Wernicke's aphasics is tentatively related to the differential syntactic/semantic
impairment classically reported in the two types of aphasia. Finally, in both studies,
the notion of procedures operating on stack-like structures is considered relevant to
the study of how integer quantities are processed in transcoding tasks. In stack
structures, elements are defined along two independent dimensions, the stack (a one-
dimensional array) to which they belong and their position within that stack. Three
stacks were considered: the units stack containing the nine digit names from 'UN'
(one) to 'NEUF' (nine); the 'particulars' stack containing the six one-word
numerals from 'ONZE' (eleven) to 'SEIZE' (sixteen); and the 'tens' stack containing
'DIX' (ten), 'VINGT' (twenty), etc.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

The subjects were the same 14 aphasic patients who participated in our previous study. There were
7 Wernicke's and 7 Broca's aphasics (including two agrammatic subjects). The subjects wrote the
numeral forms of 100 written numbers referring to the same quantities as in the former study, after at
least a two-week interval. The instructions stressed that each digit form was to be considered as a whole
representing an amount of something like money or distance and that the subject's task was to write the
corresponding form in the alphabetical coding system.

RESULTS

Analysis of Erroneous Transcriptions: Global Data

The data corpus consisted of 1,400 transcriptions produced by 14 aphasic subjects
for the 100 items of the test battery; no items were omitted. Orthographic errors that
 NUMBER TRANSCODING BY APHASICS 737

did not change the phonemic reading of the numeral lexicon elements, such as
'CINQUE' for 'CINQ' (5), were not registered as errors, nor was the incorrect use of
the letter'S' indicating the plural in some numeral lexicon elements. The omission of
the symbol '-' (hyphen) between some elements or the presence of monetary
indications ('Francs' or 'Frs') were also not considered errors.
With these conventions, 378 transcriptions were incorrect (mean frequency: 0.27).
The Broca's aphasics committed 246 errors and the Wernicke's only 132. Twelve
numbers were correctly transcoded by all the subjects, among them 10 lexical
primitives. The error frequency for the transcriptions of one-word numerals was
0.02 (2/126) for units, 0.13 (11/84) for simple tens (one-word tens names), but 0.26
(22/84) for particulars. It was 0.38 (16/42) for composed tens (two- or three-word
tens names). Since the two groups of patients were not equivalent in terms of a
criterion of severity of aphasia, the question of possible double dissociation of

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the subjects' performances by type of aphasia and one or another material dimen-
sion will be investigated by considering the relative proportions of different types
of errors within the two groups. No severity effect was found in our previous study,
the error frequencies for transcoding numerals into numbers being 0.21 for the same
7 Broca's aphasics and 0.18 for the same 7 Wernicke's aphasics (Deloche and Seron,
1982).

Qualitative Analysis
We distinguish three sources of errors in relation to the cognitive processes: errors
committed during the recognition of the digits and/or the production of their
numeral name, serial ordering errors in parsing from left to right in the digit string,
and errors in the transcoding process itself.
Digit recognition and numeral lexicon production errors. Verbal, literal, phonemic,
morphemic and neologistic paragraphias. This set contains the 23 erroneous
transcriptions where one letter string at least was alien to the numeral lexicon.
The sequence of letters may be a word (verbal paragraphia) or not, and it may
or may not share most of its units with the correct form at some level (letters,
phonemes, morphemes, or neologisms). The Broca's aphasics produced 19 such
errors, and one Wernicke's aphasic was responsible for the remaining 4. In one case,
this subject made a verbal literal paragraphia: '200' (DEUX CENTS) -> 'DEUX
CENTRE' (two centre). In 3 other cases, the errors were neologistic as in '71'
(SOIXANTE ET ONZE) -+ 'SEPTON ONZE'. The small number of neologistic
productions in the corpus is probably due to two biases: first, low-level literal
paragraphia was a selection criterion; second, orthographic errors were ignored
when scoring the subjects' productions. This small number must not, consequently,
be viewed as a significant sample of a random set of numeral writing of aphasic
subjects. The erroneous transcriptions by the Broca's aphasics were of another
nature in that they were essentially morphemic or verbal paragraphias referring to
quantities. Verbal paragraphias were sometimes numeral adjectives such as
'NEUVIEME' (ninth) in '97' (QUATRE-VINGT-DIX-SEPT) -> 'NEUVIEME
738 XAVIER SERON AND GERARD DELOCHE

SEPT', but more frequently nouns such as 'DOUZAINE' (dozen) in '112' (CENT
DOUZE)->'CENT DOUZAINE'. Morphemic paragraphias generally resulted
from incorrect suffixation of digit names either because it was not the appropriate
bound morpheme or because it required a previous modification of the digit
name. For example, '45' (QUARANTE-CINQ) was erroneously transcribed as
'QUATRANTE CINQ' with 'QUATRE' (4) in the tens position becoming
'QUATR' + 'ANTE', which is the generalization of a procedure that leads to the
correct result with other tens names. We stress that the information relative to the
stack position was always preserved in all the errors by the Broca's aphasics. They
never produced verbal paragraphias on digit names.
Stack errors. A stack error, such as '60' (SOIXANTE) -»• 'SIX' (6), is identified
in a numeral sequence that differs from the correct sequence only in that one element
of the erroneous production preserves the information regarding the position within

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the stack (6th) but not that relative to the stack itself (units for tens). There were
18 errors of this type: 10 by the Wernicke's aphasics and 8 by the Broca's. There
was a tendency in the Broca's group to produce errors by replacing particulars or
tens names by a unit in the numeral—6 out of 8 errors were of this sort—and the
Broca's aphasics never committed a stack error on a numeral unit name. The two
remaining errors consisted of confusing tens and particulars suffixes (-ANTE
and -ZE, respectively). Stack errors committed by the Wernicke's aphasics were less
regular and, in two cases, concerned unit names.
Stack position errors. In this case the processing of the information relative to the
position in the stack is disturbed, the stack information being preserved: '106002'
(CENT SIX MILLE DEUX)-*'CENT TROIS MILLE DEUX' (103002). In
6 erroneous transcriptions the only error was of this type (4 produced by Wernicke's
and 2 by Broca's aphasics).
Serial ordering errors. Aborted transcriptions. In 11 cases the transcriptions
were aborted. This occurred either with composed tens like '97' (QUATRE-
VINGT-DIX-SEPT) -• 'NEUF' (9); or with numbers like '943' (NEUF CENT
QUARANTE-TROIS) with 'CENT' (hundred) needed as a multiplicand; or in digit
strings containing at least one '0': '1016' (MILLE SEIZE) -> 'MILLE'. The Broca's
aphasics produced 10 out of the 11 such errors. This might be due to the subjects'
awareness that they had just failed or were about to fail in transcribing the items. In
such a situation, they might prefer to stop the transcription. Conversely, the lack of
such knowledge on the part of the Wernicke's aphasics might account for their very
small number of aborted transcriptions.
Numeral displacements. We define numeral displacement as an erroneous tran-
scription composed of the same individual numeral elements as the correct writing
but sequenced in a different way. There were 16 errors of this type, all committed by
the Broca's aphasics. It must be pointed out that the erroneous serial ordering of
numeral lexicon elements did not deviate randomly from the correct sequencing. In
15 cases, the errors seemed systematic and consisted of inverting the relative posi-
tions of the multiplicand and the multiplier, the former being erroneously placed
 NUMBER TRANSCODING BY APHASICS 739

before the latter, as in '27419' fVINGT-SEPT MILLE OUATRE CENT DIX-

NEUF) -> 'MILLE VINGT SEPT CENT OUATRE DIX NEUF'.
Transcoding errors. All the errors listed under the heading of transcoding errors
presuppose that each isolated digit element in the number string has been correctly
identified, that the digit string was processed from left to right in sequence, and that
there was no disturbance of the serial organization of numeral lexicon elements
when producing the response.
Metalinguistic descriptions. In 7 cases, the subjects' productions were a
metalinguistic description rather than a true numeral transcription. In such cases,
the transcriptions described either the digit string: '106002' (CENT SIX MILLE
DEUX) -• 'CENT SIX 2 ZERO DEUX', where '2 ZERO' stands for 'two times
digit 0', or an element of the numeral: '71' (SOIXANTE ET ONZE) -• 'SOIXANTE
ET UN UN' stands for 'ONZE' (U) for two occurrences of the digit '1' (UN). All

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such productions came from the Wernicke's aphasics.
Term-by-term strategy. The errors in this category resulted from the very
elementary transcoding strategy that consisted of writing each individual digit-
including '0'—by its digit name, from left to right, for example, in '4003' (QUATRE
MILLE TROIS) -• 'QUATRE ZERO ZERO TROIS'. There were 40 errors of this
type, with 35 of them being produced by the Broca's aphasics. While no such errors
occurred with composed tens in the group of Wernicke's aphasics, the Broca's
aphasics committed 18 out of the 35 erroneous transcriptions on composed tens like
'97' (QUATRE-VINGT-DIX-SEPT) -»'NEUF SEPT' or '80' (QUATRE-
VINGTS)-»'HUIT ZERO'. This result and the fact that the two agrammatic
subjects were responsible for 28 out of the 35 errors in the group of Broca's aphasics
seem to support the hypothesis that the term-by-term transcoding strategy
corresponds to a general syntactical disorder. Although this strategy might look
functionally very much like the letter-by-letter reading found in some dyslexic
syndromes, it should be noted that the agrammatic subjects who produced the
highest proportion of the erroneous term-by-term transcoding of digit strings were
not able to read out individual letters. Finally, non-French-speaking readers of this
paper should note that this strategy is by no means natural for French-speaking
subjects, since even telephone numbers are parsed into digit substrings of two or
three digits, each substring being coded into the corresponding numeral. For
instance, the phone number for the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris (5841412) would be
given as 'CINQ CENT QUATRE-VINGT QUATRE' (584) 'QUATORZE' (14)
'DOUZE' (12) and not 'CINQ HUIT QUATRE UN QUATRE UN DEUX'.
Term-by-term strategy when '1' is at the beginning of the number. The errors in
this category seem to have resulted from a transcoding strategy similar to the simple
term-by-term strategy except that the first digit of the number string is a '1' that is
not transcoded by its digit name 'UN' (1) but by 'MILLE' (thousand), 'CENT'
(hundred), or 'DIX' (10). There were 52 errors of this kind, 12 committed by the
Wernicke's aphasics and 40 by the Broca's aphasics. The first digit was generally
transcoded properly by the Wernicke's aphasics (11 cases out of 12), but only 9 times
740 XAVIER SERON AND GERARD DELOCHE

out of the 35 erroneous transcriptions produced by the two Broca's aphasics with
agrammatism. One transcribed the first digit '1' by 'CENT' (hundred) whatever the
digit string length (except particulars where the first digit T was transcoded by
'DIX' (10)). For this subject, the erroneous transcriptions may have resulted from
an overgeneralization of transcoding strategies correct in other contexts: ' 1 ' is in
fact 'CENT' in the hundreds position as in '153' (CENT CINQUANTE-TROIS)
and transcoding T in the tens position by the tens name 'DIX' (10) is correct when
followed by '0', '7', '8' and '9' but not in '112' (CENT DOUZE)^'CENT DIX
DEUX'. In the same way, the other agrammatic subject generalized the transcoding
of'1' in the thousands position by 'MILLE' to the case of six-digit numbers.
Erroneous lexical transcription of the digit T in the hundreds or the thousands
position. As a rule, the digits in the hundreds and thousands positions must be
transcribed by their digit name followed by 'CENT' (hundred) and 'MILLE'

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(thousand), respectively. Apart from the case of'0', which is never transcribed by its
digit name 'ZERO', the only exception to this rule is the digit '1' itself for which
the digit name 'UN' (1) must not be written before 'CENT' or 'MILLE'. In 17
erroneous transcriptions, the only error resulted from the violation of this
exception, the general rule being applied to produce, for example, 'UN MILLE
UN CENT DEUX' instead of 'MILLE CENT DEUX' (U02). Wernicke's
aphasics were responsible for 13 out of 17 such errors. This would not be an error in
the English numeral system. Unlike the English numeral system, the French for
1214' is read 'MILLE DEUX CENT QUATORZE' and not 'UN MILLE DEUX
CENT QUATORZE' (ONE THOUSAND . . . ) .
Omission of syntactical elements in the numeral string. Depending on their
positions in the number string, individual digits may be transcribed into one or
several elements in the corresponding numeral form. The latter occurs with 'CENT'
(hundred) and 'MILLE' (thousand) when multiplicands, with the composed
tens, and with the operator 'ET' (and). Multiplicand omissions accounted for
30 erroneous transcriptions, for example, '857' (HUIT CENT CINQUANTE-
SEPT)->'HUIT CINQUANTE SEPT', '83' (QUATRE-VINGT-TROIS)->
'QUATRE TROIS'. The Broca's aphasics produced 17 out of the 30 such errors.
The omissions of the additive constant 'DIX' (10) in composed tens accounted for
14 erroneous transcriptions (7 from each subject group). The productions were thus
syntactically well-formed numerals, but they indicated quantities that were 10 less
than the original number. In the simplest cases, 'DIX' (10) was simply omitted as
in '97' (QUATRE-VINGT-DIX-SEPT) -• 'QUATRE VINGT SEPT' (87). In other
cases, neither 'DIX' nor the particular were produced but the digit name appeared
as in '75' (SOIXANTE-QUINZE) -> 'SOIXANTE CINQ' (65). In 3 cases, the
erroneous transcriptions differed from the correct numeral only in the omission of
'QUATRE' (4) as multiplier in composed tens names, as in '91' (QUATRE-
VINGT-ONZE) -»'VINGT ONZE' or '80' (QUATRE-VINGTS) -»• 'VINGT'.
Two such errors were produced by the Broca's aphasics. There were 12 transcrip-
tions with errors consisting only of the omission of the arithmetical operator 'ET'
 NUMBER TRANSCODING BY APHASICS 741

(and). Seven such errors were produced by the Broca's aphasics, such as '51'
(CINQUANTE ET UN) -»'CINQUANTE UN' or '71' (SOIXANTE ET
ONZE) -• 'SOIXANTE ONZE'.
Mixed errors. There were 82 erroneous productions that could be interpreted
either as the result of the combination of two erroneous transcoding strategies
discussed above or in terms of one or the other strategy. Thus, the transcription
'TROIS DEUX' instead of 'TROIS CENT VINGT (320) may be either the result of
transcoding each digit into its digit name ('3' -> 'TROIS' and '2' -> 'DEUX') but
without violating the rule that '0' is never transcribed by 'ZERO', or by the omission
of 'CENT' (hundred) when a multiplicand and a stack error with '2' in the tens
position being transcribed as 'DEUX' (2) instead of'VINGT' (20). Such erroneous
transcriptions have been included in the 'mixed errors' category but, in most of the
cases, inspection of the most frequently used transcoding strategy by the par-

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ticular aphasic subject permits a choice between the different interpretations with
confidence. The combination of several sources of error is evidenced in cases like
'857' (HUIT CENT CINQUANTE-SEPT)i-» 'HUIT QUATRE SEPT', which is
obtained by transcribing each digit into its digit name ('857' -> 'HUIT CINQ
SEPT') and by a stack position error for one digit name ('QUATRE' (4) instead of
'CINQ' (5)); in '3082' 'TROIS MILLE QUATRE-VINGT-DEUX)->'TROIS
ZERO QUATRE DEUX', the same transcoding strategy (digit -> digit name) was
applied to three out of the four digits ('3', '0', '2') whereas '8' in the tens position was
correctly transcribed except for the omission of the multiplicand 'VINGT' (20):
'8'^'QUATRE' (4) instead of 'QUATRE-VINGTS'. The transcription of '70'
(SOIXANTE-DIX) by 'SEIZE' (16) combined the omission of the additive constant
'DIX' (10) by '70' -»'SOIXANTE' (60) and a stack error: transcribing the '60' by the
corresponding particular 'SEIZE' (16). In some cases, the erroneous transcriptions
contained two productions delivered by different transcoding strategies for the same
digit in the numbers. For example, '3216' (TROIS MILLE DEUX CENT SEIZE)
->• 'TROIS MILLE DEUX UN SEIZE' resulted from the omission of the
multiplicand 'CENT' (hundred) and from two transcodings of ' 1 ' in the tens
position, first by its digit name 'UN' (1) then by the particular 'SEIZE' (16). The
Broca's aphasics produced 46 out of the 82 mixed errors.
Miscellaneous errors. In this category, we placed the erroneous transcriptions that
are not of the types listed in the preceding sections. They were not numerous: 47 out
of 378 or 12.4 per cent. Yet careful examination of some miscellaneous errors
indicates that they probably resulted from disorders not clearly identifiable because
they rarely occurred in isolation in other parts of the data. A different type of
analysis of subjects' productions would, of course, have removed all 'unclassified
errors'. A taxonomic description of erroneous transcriptions, considered as serial
ordering errors combining additions, omissions, and displacements of lexical
primitives would have led to an exhaustive analysis of the data. But in this approach,
the following sophisticated miscellaneous error '90' (QUATRE-VINGT-DIX)
->'QUINZE UN ZERO' would be accounted for by suggesting that it was the result
742 XAVIER SERON AND GERARD DELOCHE

of the successive omissions of'QUATRE' (4), 'VINGT' (20), and 'DIX' (10) and the
substitution of'QUINZE' (15), 'UN' (1), and 'ZERO' (0), respectively. Such ad hoc
analysis is of little value since it is only a description of what is present and what is
absent in the erroneous transcriptions and has no relationship to the subprocesses
implied in the transcoding production task. Moreover, it cannot explain why
systematic erroneous transcriptions occur in particular contexts.

CONCLUSIONS
As indicated in the Table by the distributions of erroneous transcriptions
according to the different error sources, some factors clearly emerge that differ-
entially affected the performances of the two groups of aphasic subjects.
The group of 7 Broca's aphasics produced more erroneous transcriptions than the

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7 Wernicke's, the ratio being 1.9 to 1. Further analyses will indicate that the two
groups do indeed differ qualitatively as demonstrated by double dissociations and
error distributions departing from the global ratio. First, however, some factors
must be mentioned that might have biased the ratio in one direction or the other.
The two groups were not random samples of aphasic patients since severe
Wernicke's aphasics, who produce numerous paragraphias, were excluded from the
study, and there were two agrammatic subjects among the Broca's aphasics. The test

TABLE. DISTRIBUTION OF ERRORS BY TYPE IN EACH APHASIC GROUP

Subjects
Broca's Wernicke's
aphasics aphasics Total
Type of error (n = 7) (n = 7) (n = 14)
Paragraphias 19 4 23
Stack errors 8 10 18
Stack position errors 2 4 6
Aborted transcriptions 10 1 11
Numeral displacements 16 — 16
Metalinguistic descriptions — 7 7
Term-by-term strategy 35 5 40
Partial term-by-term strategy with
leftwards'1' 40 12 52
Undue transcription of' 1' in
thousands/hundreds positions 4 13 17
Omission of syntactical elements
Multiplicands 17 13 30
Additive constant '10' 7 7 14
Multiplier '4' 2 1 3
'ET' 7 5 12
Mixed errors 46 36 82
Miscellaneous 33 14 47
Total 246 132 378
 NUMBER TRANSCODING BY APHASICS 743

battery may also have been biased in that types of items that present more difficulty
for one group than for the other may have been over-represented.
Most of the erroneous transcriptions of Broca's aphasics seemed to result from
grammatical (nonlexical) difficulties as indicated on the morphological and
syntactical levels. Their verbal or morphemic paragraphias belonging to the domain
of quantities, their stack errors being orientated toward the units names stack, and
the very few cases of position-within-stack errors clearly demonstrated that the
individual digits in the number string were correctly identified. These errors may
have been the result either of morphological difficulties in constructing composed
(root + bound morpheme) numeral names or of syntactical impairments in parsing
the digit string into hundreds, tens, and units. The nature of the errors may
tentatively favour thefirsthypothesis. The syntactical difficulties of Broca's aphasics
were evidenced at the production level in the numeral displacement errors where

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multiplier and multiplicand were systematically reversed, thus leading to numeral
element strings where the syntactical ambiguities (thousand, hundred) were
assigned their lexical (nonmultiplicand) role (see Andreewsky and Seron, 1975, for
similarfindingsin the performance of an agrammatic patient reading aloud isolated
words and sentences). Errors involving omissions of syntactical elements (multi-
plicands, multipliers, and additive constants in composed tens, and the operator
'and') were essentially committed by Broca's aphasics (191/267). The term-by-term
transcoding strategy also differentiated the two groups of subjects since such errors
occurred 7 times more often among the Broca's than among the Wernicke's
aphasics, particularly in syntactically difficult contexts (composed tens and digit
strings ending with T , thus requiring the operator 'and').
The sources of errors in the cases of Wernicke's aphasics were less clear. The small
number of aborted transcriptions and the metalinguistic descriptions may reflect the
lack of nosognosis of such patients and their difficulty in inhibiting their responses.
The stack position errors and the nondirectional stack errors seem likely to reflect
impairments that parallel their semantic confusions in linguistic tasks. At the
syntactical level, it should be stressed that Wernicke's aphasics used the term-by-
term transcoding strategy less frequently than did the Broca's aphasics (and not
necessarily in complex syntactical contexts) and that their erroneous productions
were more often well-formed numerals (16/115) than those of the Broca's (9/211).
The differential abilities of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics in transcoding
quantities from the ideographic digital code into the alphabetical system thus seem
to parallel the results of the reverse transcoding task and the classical double
dissociation between the syntactic/semantic skills of the two groups of patients.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier expanded version of
this paper. We are also grateful to the speech therapists in the 'Centre de Reeducation du Langage', La
Salpetriere, Paris, and the 'Centre de Revalidation Neuropsychologique', Cliniques Universitaires St.
744 XAVIER SERON AND GERARD DELOCHE

Luc, UCL, Brussels, for their help in referring patients. We also thank Mrs N. Benoit, psychologist, for
her assistance in diagnoses. This research was supported by INSERM Grant no. 826023 and Grant no.
7, 81-82 from 'Les Echanges Scientifiques dans le Cadre des Accords Culturels Franco-Beiges'.

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(Received June 8, 1982. Revised January 18,1983)