14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Influence of Transition Duration on Speech Comprehension Deficit in Acute Aphasia

Kathrin Classen (1), Gabriele Scharf (2)

(1) Institute of Natural Language Processing, University of Stuttgart, Germany
(2) Edith-Stein-Rehabilitation Clinic Bad Bergzabern, Germany

The perception of place of articulation in stop consonants was investigated in left hemisphere lesioned acute aphasics, right hemisphere lesioned nonaphasics and normal controls. Experiment 1 tested the discrimination of synthetic consonant vowel (CV) syllable pairs (/ba, da, ga/) with 40 ms formant transition duration. The results showed significant differences between the groups. While aphasics had difficulties in perceiving place of articulation in stop consonants, discrimination performances in right hemisphere lesioned patients and normal controls were nearly unimpaired. A significant correlation was observed between the ability of aphasics to discriminate synthetic syllable pairs and their auditory speech comprehension (Token Test). Experiment 2 measured the effects in aphasic patients of lengthening formant transitions of CV syllables (80 ms, 120 ms). The results showed a tendency towards improved perceptual performances with increasing transition duration.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Classen, Kathrin / Scharf, Gabriele (1999): "Influence of transition duration on speech comprehension deficit in acute aphasia", In ICPhS-14, 779-782.