Abnormally slow processing of language may be a factor contributing to the poor verbal memory seen in many patients with lesions of the anterior temporal region in the left hemisphere. This possibility was examined by comparing the performance of 12 patients with left temporal-lobe resections (LT), 10 patients with similar lesions in the right hemisphere (RT) and 13 normal control (NC) subjects on a lexical-decision task, a sentence-plausibility-judgement task, and a story-recall task. Stimuli were presented aurally, and, in the latter two tasks, at 5 different speech rates ranging from 125 words per minute (wpm) to 325 wpm. Recall of stories by LT subjects was not abnormally sensitive to the effect of increasing rate, although it was inferior to that by NC subjects at all speeds. LT patients presented aurally but not visually (Frisk and Milner, 1991), suggesting that the left anterior temporal region plays a special role in the processing of speech sounds.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.61177 |
| Date | January 1991 |
| Creators | Johnsrude, Ingrid S. |
| 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 (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001271640, proquestno: AAIMM74851, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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