Work

Word deafness with preserved number word perception

Year: 2018

Type: article

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.

Source: Cognitive Neuropsychology

DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2018.1515734

Authors: Simon Fischer-Baum, Rachel Mis, Heather Dial

Institutions: Rice University, Temple University, The University of Texas at Austin

Language: English

Topic: Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funders: National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

Awards: Functional reorganization of the reading system following stroke, G6008545825, Investigating Neural Signatures of Rehabilitation in Primary Progressive Aphasia