Discrimination ability of 15 aphasic, 10 normal, and 10 brain-damaged nonaphasic adults was assessed using a specially constructed discrimination test designed to assess ability to discriminate important acoustic cues for distinctive features of phonemes. A single acoustic cue, such as stopgap duration, spectrum of a consonantal burst peak, or direction and extent of a second-formant transition, created the only difference in minimal pairs which were otherwise acoustically identical. Three of the subtests utilized a spectral cue and three a temporal cue. All subtests used human rather than synthesized speech, and each was altered by a variety of dubbing, filtering, and splicing procedures. Of the 15 aphasic subjects studied, seven failed both the discrimination test and a comprehension test, suggesting that their comprehension disturbances may arise from reduced ability to discriminate acoustic cues for speech sounds. In contrast, both the normal and brain-damaged nonaphasic groups were successful on the discrimination test, suggesting that failure on these discrimination tasks was not simply a function of age or brain damage per se. Moreover, discrimination failure by the aphasics was not evenly distributed. Rather, the aphasic subjects experienced significantly more failures on the temporal cues and were generally successful on the subtests involving cues of a spectral nature.
The word finding skills of a group of 20 stuttering children (5 to 12 years of age) were compared with those of a control group of 20 normally speaking children matched for age and socioeconomic status. The Northwestern Word Latency Test was administered in which each child was shown 46 pictures of common objects. Any picture not named readily on the initial presentation was eliminated from subsequent administrations of the test for that child. Four additional administrations of the remaining pictures in the series were carried out.,Fifty-five percent of the Ss were found to have easily demonstrable word finding problems. Older children in both the stuttering and nonstuttering groups named pictures faster than the younger, but the older stutterers were only as fast as the younger nonstutterers. Moreover, young and old stutterers without word finding difficulties did not differ in meaning response time from young nonstutterers. gnq
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