Spectral and temporal degradation of speech as a simulation of morphosyntactic deficits in English and German.
Spectral and temporal degradation of the speech stream is increasingly used to model receptive language deficits such as aphasia and developmental language disorders. As with results from patient studies, the specific pattern of receptive deficits can reveal underlying structural and processing characteristics of different languages. Here, we test English- and German-speaking college students' auditory comprehension of complex morphosyntactic structures under normal and 'dual-degradation' conditions. The resulting profiles of strength and vulnerability in the two languages highlight the cross-linguistic differences in reliability of syntactic and morphological cues, and closely resemble the deficits observed in previous studies of receptive aphasia.
Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, 9500 Gilman Drive, Mail Code 0526, La Jolla, San Diego, CA 92093-0526, USA. fdick@cogsci.ucsd.edu
Frederic
F
Dick
Elizabeth
E
Bates
Evelyn C
EC
Ferstl
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001037:Aphasia / Q000175:diagnosis*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011897:Random Allocation; D011930:Reaction Time; D013067:Speech Perception