Biomedical subjects

T Crul

Publications and source records attributed to T Crul.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1996

Perception of voicing cues by children with early otitis media with and without language impairment.

Research on the relationship between early otitis media with effusion (OME), language impairment, and central auditory processing has been equivocal. Identification and discrimination tasks provide us with a sensitive method of assessing speech perception on both an auditory and a phonetic level. The present study examined identification and discrimination of initial bilabial stop consonants differing in voicing by 9-year-old children with a history of severe OME. The groups studied were controlled for language impairment. The ability of these children to perceive major and minor voicing cues was examined using multiple voicing cues. Long-term effects of OME were found for both identification and discrimination performance. Children with OME produced an overall inconsistency in categorization, which suggests poorer phonetic processing. Discrimination was measured by means of "just noticeable differences" (JND). Children with early OME experience demonstrated a greater mean JND than children without early OME experience. Finally, in cases of language impairment with early OME, there was no additional deterioration of auditory or phonetic processing. It appears that either early OME or language impairment can lead to poorer perception.

Adult↗

PubMed1996

The specific relation between perception and production errors for place of articulation in developmental apraxia of speech.

Developmental apraxia of speech is a disorder of phonological and articulatory output processes. However, it has been suggested that perceptual deficits may contribute to the disorder. Identification and discrimination tasks offer a fine-grained assessment of central auditory and phonetic functions. Seventeen children with developmental apraxia (mean age 8:9, years:months) and 16 control children (mean age 8:0) were administered tests of identification and discrimination of resynthesized and synthesized monosyllabic words differing in place-of-articulation of the initial voiced stop consonants. The resynthetic and synthetic words differed in the intensity of the third formant, a variable potentially enlarging their clinical value. The results of the identification task showed equal slopes for both subject groups, which indicates no phonetic processing deficit in developmental apraxia of speech. The hypothesized effect of the manipulation of the intensity of the third formant of the stimuli was not substantiated. However, the children with apraxia demonstrated poorer discrimination than the control children, which suggests affected auditory processing. Furthermore, analyses of discrimination performance and articulation data per apraxic subject demonstrated a specific relation between the degree to which auditory processing is affected and the frequency of place-of-articulation substitutions in production. This indicates the interdependence of perception and production. The results also suggest that the use of perceptual tasks has significant clinical value.

Apraxias↗

PubMed1991

Word deafness and auditory cortical function. A case history and hypothesis.

A patient who already had Wernicke's aphasia due to a left temporal lobe lesion suffered a severe deterioration specifically of auditory language comprehension, subsequent to right temporal lobe infarction. A detailed comparison of his new condition with his language status before the second stroke revealed that the newly acquired deficit was limited to tasks related to auditory input. Further investigations demonstrated a speech perceptual disorder, which we analysed as due to deficits both at the level of general auditory processes and at the level of phonetic analysis. We discuss some arguments related to hemisphere specialization of phonetic processing and to the disconnection explanation of word deafness that support the hypothesis of word deafness being generally caused by mixed deficits.

Aphasia, Wernicke↗