title: Finding levels of abstraction in speech production: evidence from sound-production impairment.
abstract: A widely held view in linguistics and psycholinguistics is that there are distinct levels of processing for context-independent and context-specific representations of sound structure. Recently, this view has been disputed, in part because of the absence of clear evidence that there are abstract mental representations of discrete sound-structure units. Here, we present novel evidence that separate context-independent and context-specific representations of sound structure are supported by distinct brain mechanisms that can be selectively impaired in individuals with acquired brain deficits. Acoustic data from /s/-deletion errors of 2 aphasic speakers suggest both a phonological level of processing at which sound representations (e.g., /p/) do not specify context-specific detail (e.g., aspirated or unaspirated) and a distinct level at which context-specific information is represented. These data help constrain accounts of sound-structure processing in word production and crucially support the claim that context-independent linguistic information affects language production.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, New York University, New York, NY 10012, USA. buchwald@nyu.edu
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Buchwald
authors.forename: Michele
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Miozzo
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013065:Speech Intelligibility; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014831:Voice