Acoustic and phonemic processing are impaired in individuals with aphasia

Abstract

Acoustic and phonemic processing are understudied in aphasia, a language disorder that can affect different levels and modalities of language processing. For successful speech comprehension, processing of the speech envelope is necessary, which relates to amplitude changes over time (e.g., the rise times). Moreover, to identify speech sounds (i.e., phonemes), efficient processing of spectro-temporal changes as reflected in formant transitions is essential. Given the underrepresentation of aphasia studies on these aspects, we tested rise time processing and phoneme identification in 29 individuals with post-stroke aphasia and 23 healthy age-matched controls. We found significantly lower performance in the aphasia group than in the control group on both tasks, even when controlling for individual differences in hearing levels and cognitive functioning. Further, by conducting an individual deviance analysis, we found a low-level acoustic or phonemic processing impairment in 76% of individuals with aphasia. Additionally, we investigated whether this impairment would propagate to higher-level language processing and found that rise time processing predicts phonological processing performance in individuals with aphasia. These findings show that it is important to develop diagnostic and treatment tools that target low-level language processing mechanisms.

Exploring neural tracking of acoustic and linguistic speech representations in individuals with post-stroke aphasia

“…This would mean that IWA also show impaired processing of speech acoustics. This is in line with findings from Kries et al (2023), who found that 76% of IWA had a low-level acoustic or phonemic processing impairment.…”

“…The target age of healthy controls was gradually adapted based on the mean age of IWA included in the study (supplementary figure S.2). The participants in this study are partly overlapping with participants in Kries et al (2023).…”

“…Only significant correlations are colored. Note: Rise time and phoneme identification tasks are measuring acoustic and phoneme processing, the tasks are described in detail in (Kries et al, 2023). MCQ=multiple choice question; YNQ=Yes/No question.…”

Exploring neural tracking of acoustic and linguistic speech representations in individuals with post‐stroke aphasia

“…All aphasia participants were tested in the chronic phase after stroke (time since stroke onset in months median [range]: 16.1 [6–126.1]). The aphasia sample was checked for language impairments at the moment of data collection using two standardized diagnostic aphasia tests, that is, the diagnostic test ScreeLing Visch‐Brink et al ( 2010 ) and the Dutch picture‐naming test (Nederlandse Benoemtest [NBT]; Van Ewijk et al, 2020 , using the same procedure as reported in Kries et al, 2023 ). The ScreeLing was administered on a tablet using the Gorilla Experiment Builder ( http://www.gorilla.sc ; Anwyl‐Irvine et al, 2020 ).…”

Tafsir Mushafi Tentang Fonologi dan Ragam Modelnya

“…[25] Phonology is also defined as the science that studies functional sounds in certain language structures in terms of their nature, quality, and semantic function, or in other words the science that studies the function of semantic sounds in a word and sentence structure in a language. [26] Knowledge of modern linguistics is what helps us to interpret the causes of some sounds or all of them so that they can become a decree without change. In modern linguistic science, the sounds of language are closely related to acoustic equivalence phonetics ( ‫األكوستيكي‬ ‫]72[.…”