Diana Van Lancker

Comprehension of familiar phrases by left- but not by right-hemisphere damaged patients

Single words, familiar phrases (idioms and speech formulas), and novel sentences (matched to the familiar phrases in length, frequency, and structure) were selected for a picture-matching auditory comprehension task and administered to left- and right-brain damaged (LBD, RBD) subjects. The groups did not differ in single word comprehension. A 2 x 2 ANOVA revealed opposite patterns on the two other tasks, with LBD subjects performing worse on novel than familiar phrases, and RBD subject impaired on familiar phrase but not on novel sentence comprehension. The role of grammatical/referential vs. holistic/inferential meaning in left and right hemisphere function is discussed.

Voice discrimination and recognition are separate abilities

Studies of brain-damaged subjects indicate that recognizing a familiar voice and discriminating among unfamiliar voices may be selectively impaired, and thus that the two are separate functions. Familiar voice recognition was impaired in cases of damage to the right (but not the left) hemisphere, while impaired unfamiliar voice discrimination was observed in cases with damage to either hemisphere.

Phonagnosia: A Dissociation Between Familiar and Unfamiliar Voices

A dissociation between facial recognition and facial discrimination is well known, but investigations of phonagnosia (impairment of voice recognition and discrimination) have not been pursued. Using familiar and unfamiliar voices as stimuli, a marked difference between the ability to recognize familiar voice and the ability to discriminate between unfamiliar voices was identified in five patients, and a sixth showed a severe impairment in both tasks. Clinical and radiologic findings in these cases suggest that recognition of familiar voices is impaired by damage to inferior and lateral parietal regions of the right hemisphere, whereas impairment of voice discrimination abilities is associated with temporal lobe damage of either hemisphere. This dissociation of recognition and discrimination of the human voice suggests that these two functions are mediated by different brain structures and may contribute differentially clinical syndromes.

Recognition of emotional‐prosodic meanings in speech by autistic, schizophrenic, and normal children

The abilities of autistic, schizophrenic, and normal‐control children to label four emotional intonations (the emotional task) in speech were tested, along with a linguistic task. All stimuli were pretested on normal adults. Older (≥ 8 years of age) normal children performed as well as adults on both tasks; younger normal children and both younger and older autistic children performed poorly on the emotional task; children (all older) diagnosed as schizophrenic were not significantly impaired in either task. Mental age was not correlated with performance in autistic children. The relevance of these results to other findings regarding emotional and linguistic behaviors in normal and disabled children is considered.

Disturbances of the temporal organization of speech following bilateral thalamic surgery in a patient with Parkinson's disease

This report summarizes a detailed analysis of the speech of a 45-yr-old man who had become dysarthric following bilateral thalamic surgery for the relief of symptoms of Parkinsons disease. His speech was characterized by a rapid rate and a mild-to-moderate articulatory deficit. Intelligibility was markedly reduced. The rapid rate was found to be the result of decreased syllable durations rather than to changes in pause or phrase patterns. Decreased syllable durations resulted from abnormal shortening of vowels. Consonant releases were found to be prolonged. This distorted temporal relationship among speech segments was considered to be an important factor in the patients poor intelligibility and partially explained why uniform electronic expansion of his speech resulted in only negligible increase in intelligibility. It is hypothesized that this speech disturbance results from the interaction of central metronomic abnormality with a peripheral neuromotor articulatory impairment.

Hemispheric specialization for voice recognition: evidence from dichotic listening.

To measure lateralization of voice recognition abilities in normal subjects, listeners identified both the speaker (a famous male) and the word spoken on each trial in a dichotic listening paradigm. The voice identification task resulted in a zero ear advantage, which differed significantly from the significant right ear advantage found for word identification. This suggests that voice and word information, although carried in the same auditory signal, engage different cerebral mechanisms.

A Case Report of Pathological Rule-Governed Syllable Intrusion

A detailed analysis of a unique speech disturbance, marked by the frequent appearance in the speech stream of a meaningless intrusive syllable, is presented. Following a lengthy thoracic surgery, an American English speaking patient began to speak with non-English prosodic patterns, which evolved to a conspicuous intrusion in his speech of the syllable /sis/. This syllable and its variants were attached to words in a manner which conformed to the regular phonological rules in English (for formation of plural, possessive, and third person singular morphemes). The distribution and frequency of the intrusive syllable are described, and possible explanations for the abnormal occurrence of this particular syllable are discussed.

Familiar voice recognition and unfamiliar voice discrimination are independent and unordered abilities

One‐hundred and ten normal and thirty‐two brain‐damaged (BD) subjects were tested on voice discrimination and voice recognition protocols. The recognition task included samples of famous male voices in a multiple‐choice format; the discrimination test consisted of pairs of male voices in a same‐different task. Three findings suggest a dissociation between the two abilities. (1) Scores on the two tasks were only slightly correlated in normal subjects and were not significantly correlated in BD subjects, suggesting no obligatory relationship between performance on one task and performance on the other. (2) RBD subjects performed significantly less well than normal controls in recognition, while LBD subjects did not differ from normals; brain damage in either hemisphere affected discrimination abilities. (3) Nearly half of the BD subjects showed very large discrepancies between scores on the tasks, with chance performance on one alongside normal scores on the other. These asymmetries in performance occurred ...

Recognition of Environmental Sounds in Autistic Children

Abstract Environmental sound recognition was tested in children with an autistic disorder, along with recognition of spoken words for the same target items, using a picture-matching task. No overall difference between sound and word recognition scores was observed for either autistic or normal subjects. However, those autistic children found to achieve high scores on the sounds also scored highly on a visual pattern matching task. Thus, a pattern-matching ability was found across two modalities, visual and auditory, in this subgroup of children with an autistic disorder. Possible relevance of this finding to hemispheric dominance (as reflected by handedness studies) in autism, and to the putative inabilities of these children to recognize affectual cues, are considered. These findings also have implications for clinical assessment, indicating that tests of pattern-matching may provide more specific information about preserved skills in the individual child with an autistic disorder. J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry , 1988, 27, 4:423–427.

Recognition of famous voices forwards and backwards

To investigate familiar voice recognition, samples of famous male voices were tape‐recorded and edited on a PDP‐11/34 computer. Three listening tasks were prepared. Subjects indicated whether they recognized voices from (1) 2‐s samples; (2) different and reordered 2‐s samples presented along with six choices; and (3) 4‐s samples presented backwards (rerandomized and refoiled). Ninety‐six subjects were divided into four groups, three by age and one given the backwards presentation first. For task 1, the mean recognition rate was 17%. In task 2, subjects correctly identified 69.5% of the voices they knew (ascertained by questionnaires). Recognition for known voices presented backwards was 12.8% less than for voices presented forwards. In the group given the voices backwards first, a similar difference (12.5%) was observed. A two‐way ANOVA comparing the four groups on tasks 2 and 3 revealed main effects of group and task, but no group‐by‐task interaction; thus differences in performance between forwards and ...