The present study was designed to examine the contribution of lexically-based sources of information to acoustic-phonetic processing in fluent and nonfluent aphasic subjects, and age-matched normals. To this end, two phonetic identification experiments were conducted which required subjects to label syllable-initial bilabial stop consonants as either /b/ or /p/. Factors that were controlled included the lexical status (word/nonword) and neighborhood density values corresponding to the two possible syllable interpretations in each set of stimuli. Findings indicated that all subject groups were influenced by both lexical status and neighborhood density in making phonetic categorizations. Although the overall results were inconsistent with the theory that nonfluent aphasics may utilize heuristic strategies in language processing more than fluent aphasics or normals, neighborhood influences seemed to be stronger for both groups of aphasics relative to control subjects. Findings regarding the time course of lexical and neighborhood effects suggested that these influences were co-occurring in phonetic identification. Results are discussed with respect to models of word recognition and theories of acoustic-phonetic perception and lexical access in normal and aphasic populations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.27501 |
| Date | January 1997 |
| Creators | Boyczuk, Jeffrey P. |
| Contributors | Baum, Shari (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001601419, proquestno: MQ37099, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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