Word deafness with preserved number word perception

Abstract

We describe the performance of an aphasic individual, K.A., who showed a selective impairment affecting his ability to perceive spoken language, while largely sparing his ability to perceive written language and to produce spoken language. His spoken perception impairment left him unable to distinguish words or nonwords that differed on a single phoneme and he was no better than chance at auditory lexical decision or single spoken word and single picture matching with phonological foils. Strikingly, despite this profound impairment, K.A. showed a selective sparing in his ability to perceive number words, which he was able to repeat and comprehend largely without error. This case adds to a growing literature demonstrating modality-specific dissociations between number word and non-number word processing. Because of the locus of K.A.'s speech perception deficit for non-number words, we argue that this distinction between number word and non-number word processing arises at a sublexical level of representations in speech perception, in a parallel fashion to what has previously been argued for in the organization of the sublexical level of representation for speech production.

Syntactic priming reveals an explicit syntactic representation of multi-digit verbal numbers

“…These studies clearly show that the verbal number's syntax was parsed at some stage, however, they not demonstrate an explicit representation of the number syntax, because in both studies the syntactic effect could be explained as ad-hoc strategies based on low-level syntactic information. For example, the participants in the dictation task (Lochy et al) could have detected syntactic markers in the verbal numbers in an early auditory stage (Fischer-Baum et al, 2018), and may have used this information to chunk the number correspondingly -either into two pairs or into a digit + triplet.…”

Reducing interference improves the memorization of multiplication facts in case of hypersensitivity to interference

“…Further support to the role of phonological interference comes from studies of non-number words, which show that word memorization is affected by their phonological similarity to each other (Nelson et al, 1974;Pajak et al, 2016;Runquist, 1970). However, interpreting these findings as an explanation for difficulties in memorizing multiplication facts should be done with caution, because at least some phonological mechanisms treat words and numbers differently: e.g., the speech mechanisms handle words as sequences of phonemes, but numbers words as whole building blocks -in speech production (Bencini et al, 2011;Cohen, Verstichel, & Dehaene, 1997;Dotan & Friedmann, 2015Shalev, Ophir, Gvion, Gil, & Friedmann, 2014), and apparently also in speech comprehension (Fischer-Baum, Mis, & Dial, 2018). Furthermore, the representation of multiplication facts in memory is apparently not purely phonological (Whalen, McCloskey, Lindemann, & Bouton, 2002).…”

Syntactic chunking reveals a core syntactic representation of multi-digit numbers, which is generative and automatic

“…Different types of syntactic information are handled by different cognitive processes. For example, there are separate syntactic processes to handle sentences versus algebraic expressions, or words versus numbers (Dotan & Friedmann, 2015Dotan et al, 2014;Fischer-Baum et al, 2018;Monti et al, 2012;Varley et al, 2005). Nevertheless, the different syntactic processes in different domains may still have certain shared aspects (Dehaene et al, 2015;Hauser et al, 2002;Scheepers et al, 2011).…”