BRAIN AND LANGUAGE 14, 235-271 (1981) An Investigation of Repetition and Language Processing in a Case of Conduction Aphasia ALFONSO CARAMAZZA The Johns Hopkins University ANNAMARIA G. BASILI AND JERRY J. KOLLER Fort Howard Veterans Administration Medical Center AND RITA SLOAN BERNDT The Johns Hopkins University A study is reported of a single case of conduction aphasia. A battery of tasks designed to investigate the parameters of the patient’s severe repetition deficit is supplemented by tests of several language functions. The results provide extensive information on a wide range of the patient’s language abilities and are used to evaluate the adequacy of four models that have been offered to account for conduction aphasia. An argument is made in support of the suggestion that the syndrome of conduction aphasia should be divided into two subgroups based on patients’ ability to select and realize phonemes in speech output. It is con- cluded that the best explanation for the disorder of patients with repetition deficit but without significant speech output problems is the hypothesis that repetition ability is compromised by a pathological limitation of auditory-verbal short-term memory. This hypothesis is extended to account for the pattern of results ob- tained in the language tasks. In 1874 Carl Wernicke predicted the syndrome of conduction aphasia on the basis of his neuroanatomical model of the distribution and inter- action of language functions in the dominant hemisphere. Lichtheim’s The research reported here was supported by NIH Research Grant 14099 to the Johns Hopkins University. We would like to thank John Hart for designing the oral reading tasks, and for his help in testing the patients on several of the tasks. We would also like to thank Edgar Zurif for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Address reprint requests to Dr. Alfonso Caramazza, Department of Psychology, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218. 235 0093-934X/81/060235-37$02.00/0 Copyright 0 1981 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved