| Abstract: | Examined the relationship between ability to discriminate and identify 3 synthetic speech continua representing vowel, voicing, and place contrasts and level of auditory language comprehension in 19 41–68 yr old male aphasics and 8 42–65 yr old non-brain-damaged controls. Aphasics were assigned to a good or a moderate comprehension group (GCG and MCG) on the basis of their auditory language comprehension scores. Both groups of aphasics performed the same as controls on the vowel contrasts. In comparison with controls, aphasics in the MCG had difficulty perceiving voicing and place contrasts, whereas aphasics in the GCG had difficulty perceiving place contrasts only. The MCG had more difficulty than the other 2 groups in discriminating stimuli at the inner boundary of each phoneme category. They were also most impaired in identifying the endpoints of the place and voicing continua. Place contrasts were more difficult to identify than voicing contrasts for both aphasic groups. In terms of the relationship between discrimination and identification, the majority of Ss either discriminated and identified the stimuli at equal levels of performance, or discriminated but did not identify the stimuli. Results indicate that auditory language comprehension predicts, to some extent, perception of voicing and place contrasts. (French abstract) (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
