Revisiting ‘The influence of literacy in paraphasias of aphasic speakers’ DORA COLAÇO 1 , ANA MINEIRO 1 , GABRIELA LEAL 2 ,& ALEXANDRE CASTRO-CALDAS 1 1 Institute of Health Sciences, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal, 2 Department of Neurology, Santa Maria Hospital, Lisbon, Portugal (Received 15 March 2010; Accepted 24 June 2010) Abstract Literature suggests that illiterate subjects are unaware of the phonological structure of language. This fact may influence the characteristics of aphasic speech, namely the structure of paraphasias. A battery of tests was developed for this study to be used with aphasic subjects (literate and illiterate), in order to explore this topic in more detail. This article aims to present the experimental design and the results of this test battery composed of two sub-tests: (i) a naming test with words that belong to three distinct groups: high frequency simple words (HFSW), low frequency simple words (LFSW), and low frequency complex words (LFCW); and (ii) a word repetition test. The variables of literacy, frequency and word morphology, and their effect on the performance of aphasic groups, were correlated in this study. Morphology was the variable that exercised the greatest influence on the verbal production of the participants. Keywords: aphasia, literacy, word frequency, morphology Introduction Different types of analysis of the errors produced by aphasic patients are presented in this study. The experiment was designed to allow us, on the one hand, to analyse the differences between the errors produced by literate aphasic patients and illiterate aphasic patients, while on the other, to analyse the differences relative to the results of word frequency and their morphological construction. This study is intended to be an extension of a previous study started in 2009 (Colaço, Mineiro, Leal, & Castro-Caldas, 2009). The results of this pilot study steer the hypothesis that there are differences in error production between literate and illiterate aphasic subjects. This study intends to continue with this analysis of the types of errors produced by them, as well as how the lexical variables of word frequency and morphology influence the perfor- mance of the different groups in these types of task. Correspondence: Alexandre Castro-Caldas, Institute of Health Sciences, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal. Tel: 00351 217 214 147. Fax: 00351 217 263 980. E-mail: acastrocaldas@ics.lisboa.ucp.pt ISSN 0269-9206 print/ISSN 1464-5076 online © 2010 Informa UK Ltd. DOI: 10.3109/02699206.2010.511406 Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, November 2010; 24(11): 890–905