Speech sound errors in patients with conduction and Broca's aphasia

doi:10.1016/0093-934X(83)90041-X

Brain and Language

Volume 20, Issue 2, November 1983, Pages 175-194

https://doi.org/10.1016/0093-934X(83)90041-X Get rights and content

Abstract

Speech sound errors exhibited by three conduction and three Broca's aphasic patients on naming and word-repetition tasks were subjected to phonemic and subphonemic analyses. In the conduction aphasic patients, errors occurred equally often on consonants and vowels in both the naming and word-repetition tasks, while in the Broca's aphasic patients errors occurred selectively on consonants. Transposition errors occurred almost as often as substitution errors in the conduction aphasic patients, while substitution errors constituted the majority of errors in the Broca's aphasic patients. The Broca's aphasic patients, as compared to the conduction aphasic patients, exhibited a markedly higher number of substitution errors occurring between phonemes separated by a single subphonemic feature on the naming task. On the basis of these findings, it was hypothesized that the differences in the error patterns of the two types of aphasia reflected differences in the underlying mechanisms of the impairment in each type.

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Phonological simplifications, apraxia of speech and the interaction between phonological and phonetic processing
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Citation Excerpt :
The influential studies by Blumstein (1973, 1978) reported no differences between patient groups in the type of sound errors they produced (see also Holloman and Drummond, 1991). Early on, however, other studies reported differences between groups, with apraxic patients showing a stronger concentration of errors on consonants (Burns and Canter, 1977; Monoi et al., 1983) as well as more substitutions closer to the target and fewer sequencing errors (Canter et al., 1985). Syllabic simplifications have also been shown to be more prevalent in patients with AoS than in patients with PhI (see Keller, 1984; Goldrick and Rapp, 2007; Nespoulous et al., 1984; Romani and Galluzzi, 2005; Romani et al., 2011a,b; see also Edmonds and Marquardt, 2004; Staiger and Ziegler, 2008 for evidence of syllable complexity effects in patients with AoS, but without a contrasting group).
Research on aphasia has struggled to identify apraxia of speech (AoS) as an independent deficit affecting a processing level separate from phonological assembly and motor implementation. This is because AoS is characterized by both phonological and phonetic errors and, therefore, can be interpreted as a combination of deficits at the phonological and the motoric level rather than as an independent impairment. We apply novel psycholinguistic analyses to the perceptually phonological errors made by 24 Italian aphasic patients. We show that only patients with relative high rate (>10%) of phonetic errors make sound errors which simplify the phonology of the target. Moreover, simplifications are strongly associated with other variables indicative of articulatory difficulties – such as a predominance of errors on consonants rather than vowels – but not with other measures – such as rate of words reproduced correctly or rates of lexical errors. These results indicate that sound errors cannot arise at a single phonological level because they are different in different patients. Instead, different patterns: (1) provide evidence for separate impairments and the existence of a level of articulatory planning/programming intermediate between phonological selection and motor implementation; (2) validate AoS as an independent impairment at this level, characterized by phonetic errors and phonological simplifications; (3) support the claim that linguistic principles of complexity have an articulatory basis since they only apply in patients with associated articulatory difficulties.
Aphasia, phonological and phonetic voicing within the consonantal system: Preservation of phonological oppositions and compensatory strategies
2013, Language Sciences
Citation Excerpt :
Since the beginnings of aphasiology research, numerous studies have reported on aphasic patients’ difficulties with voicing control, which have let them formulate an initial classification according to which these difficulties have been interpreted as a result of phonetic deficit (non-fluent aphasias) or phonological deficit (fluent aphasias) (cf. for example, Alajouanine et al., 1939). This dichotomy is established not only from the results of the extremely large number of case studies (Lecours and Lhermitte, 1969; Poncet et al., 1972; Blumstein, 1973; Blumstein et al., 1977, 1980; Freeman et al., 1978; Benson, 1979; Itoh et al., 1980, 1982; Goodglass and Kaplan, 1983; Monoi et al., 1983; Canter et al., 1985; Nespoulous et al., 1982, 1983, 1987; by a review, cf. Blumstein, 2001), which aimed to establish a correlation between the injury that occurred, the patients’ psycholinguistic aptitudes and the treatment stages in language production, but also owing to the hypothesis according to which the frontal cortex would be responsible for planning and executing the motor gestures for speech, while retro-Rolandic injuries would lead to deficits in phonemic selection (premotor level, according to McNeilage, 1982). In general, most of the studies cited above and performed with non-fluent aphasiacs attribute the difficulties observed with regard to voicing to a deficit in temporal control and in the coordination of two independent articulators (activation of glottal excitation and supra-glottal closure).
A great number of studies in aphasiology have reported devoicing of voiced consonants in patients who have particular difficulty with the phonetic processing of speech. Recently, other studies have made attempts to account for these difficulties not only in negative terms of ‘deficit’ but also, positively, as a palliative strategy which patients would resort to in order to compensate, at least partly, for their deficit.
The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the ongoing debate about devoicing phenomena in aphasia. We carried out a multiple-case study in which we acoustically analysed consonants distinguished by the voiced–voiceless contrast in order to determine, for each patient: (a) the nature of their deficit: whether it is phonological (pre-motor level of speech processing) or phonetic (motor level); and (b) the existence of possible palliative strategies. Results obtained from anarthria and Broca’s aphasia speech output indicate that the subjects differ in a statistically significant way (p < .05) between the VOT values according to whether the target consonant is voiced or voiceless. This can be interpreted, in the patients under study, as a deficit at the level of planning and/or implementation of the voicing feature without impairment, at a deeper level of processing, of the phonological encoding. These results also show that the subjects resort to alternative acoustic cues such as (i) Voice Termination Time (VTT), (ii) total duration of the segment, (iii) number of noise bursts or (iv) duration of the preceding vowel to mark the phonological opposition of voicing, therefore suggesting that they are making use of palliative strategies to compensate for their deficit.
More vulnerable processing of shengmu than yunmu in a Chinese Broca's aphasic
2011, Journal of Neurolinguistics
Citation Excerpt :
Our findings suggest that the performance on shengmu, yunmu, and tone does not support significant grouping when these characters are classified by frequency (χ2 = 6.343, P > 0.05). Although results provide evidence for more vulnerable processing of shengmu than yunmu in Chinese, it can be argued that patients with Broca’s aphasia tend to have difficulty in initiating speech production (Monoi, Fukusako, Itoh, & Sasanuma, 1983). The higher number of errors that Tang made on shengmu may be attributed to this reason.
Previous neuropsychological studies on European languages have provided evidence for separable processing of consonants and vowels. In this study, we present the case of a Chinese speaker with classical Broca’s aphasia following a vascular lesion in the left inferior frontal gyrus. In the task of reading aloud Chinese characters and phrases, she made more errors on shengmu (initial consonant phoneme of a Chinese syllable), at a rate of approximately 2:1, than yunmu (final phoneme(s) of a Chinese syllable). There are two types of yunmu: only vowel(s) and vowel(s) and consonant(s) together. A further test revealed that the speaker showed no significant difference in her error rates for the two types of yunmu. We consider more vulnerable processing of shengmu than yunmu in the Chinese Broca’s aphasic. Likewise, this case as a model of focal brain damage provides evidence for the role of Broca’s area in the processing of speech production based on the patient’s poor articulation but relatively preserved comprehension, phonemic discrimination and auditory word recognition. We claim that Broca’s area is crucial for articulation of shengmu which need complex articulatory movements.
Levels of description in consonant/vowel processing: Reply to Knobel and Caramazza
2007, Brain and Language
Is it necessary to posit separate, explicit distinctions between representations in order to account for dissociations between consonant and vowel processing? We argue that a cognitive model of speech production based on cumulative lower-level properties is not only sufficient but more parsimonious in accounting for aphasic and dysgraphic patient data. We re-examine a computational model of consonant and vowel processing based on phonological feature representations of phonemes, and show that models based on similar principles are sufficient to account for quantitative and qualitative aspects of the patient data. We argue that the facts that aphasic patients (i) are more likely to have impairment to consonant than vowel representations, (ii) demonstrate varying degrees of impairment to both consonants and vowels in an inverse relationship, and (iii) never indicate complete impairment to only vowels or consonants, are better accounted for in a model that assumes a continuum of representations of consonants and vowels than a model that explicitly encodes the consonant/vowel distinction.
A structural account of phonological paraphasias
2005, Brain and Language
The aim of this study is to develop a partial theory of phonological paraphasias which has some cross-syndrome and cross-linguistic validity. It is based on the distinction between content and structural units and emphasizes the role of the latter. The notion of structure holds the key to an understanding of the differences among the following three types of data: slips of the tongue, slips of the pen (defined as errors committed by healthy, competent adults), and paraphasias. A comparison of these three data types reveals that slips of the pen and paraphasias display striking similarities whereas slips of the tongue stand apart. This pattern emerges very clearly in an analysis of nine empirical effects all of which are found to be of a structural nature. On the basis of these results, it is argued that both the written output of normals and the oral output of aphasics are generated under a reduced structural representation (i.e., weak activation of structural nodes). However, the reasons for the diminished sensitivity to structure are not the same in the two modalities. While the impoverished structural representation is a likely consequence of the relatively slow production rate in writing, it may stem from an impaired transmission of activation among structural nodes in aphasia. By contrast, the normal speaking process occurs under the sway of a full-fledged structural representation. Hence, slips of the tongue are highly sensitive to structural effects.
Abstract morphemes and lexical representation: The CV-Skeleton in Arabic
2004, Cognition
Overlaps in form and meaning between morphologically related words have led to ambiguities in interpreting priming effects in studies of lexical organization. In Semitic languages like Arabic, however, linguistic analysis proposes that one of the three component morphemes of a surface word is the CV-Skeleton, an abstract prosodic unit coding the phonological shape of the surface word and its primary syntactic function, which has no surface phonetic content (McCarthy, J. J. (1981). A prosodic theory of non-concatenative morphology, Linguistic Inquiry, 12 373–418). The other two morphemes are proposed to be the vocalic melody, which conveys additional syntactic information, and the root, which defines meaning. In three experiments using masked, cross-modal, and auditory–auditory priming we examined the role of the vocalic melody and the CV-Skeleton as potential morphemic units in the processing and representation of Arabic words. Prime/target pairs sharing the vocalic melody but not the CV-Skeleton consistently failed to prime. In contrast, word pairs sharing only the CV-Skeleton primed reliably throughout, with the amount of priming being as large as that observed between word pattern pairs sharing both vocalic melody and CV-Skeleton. Priming between morphologically related words can be observed when there is no overlap either in meaning or in surface phonetic form.

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^☆: This work was supported in part by a grant from the Adult Disease Clinic Memorial Foundation and a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (No. 56570792), the Japanese Ministry of Education.

²: Present address: Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology, 35-2, Sakaecho, Itabashiku, Tokyo-173, Japan.

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Speech sound errors in patients with conduction and Broca's aphasia☆

Abstract

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