Syllabic Processes in Persons with Phonetic-Phonological Disorders

Neurogenic speech disorders offer the possibility to observe the cognitive interface between phonological and motor-articulatory mechanisms. Two syndromes are of particular interest: Apraxia of speech (AOS) and Conduction aphasia (CA). Both occur after a stroke in the left cerebral arteries and affect relevant speech-motor regions. AOS is considered as disorder of speech motor planning while in CA traditionally the lexical-and-postlexical phonological encoding is disturbed. This study tries to get insights into the cognitive reality of phonetic-phonological mechanisms by a verbal repetition task. Accordingly, speech disorders such as AOS and CA show a different sensitivity to segmental and suprasegmental factors, as well as in the ability to natural vowel reductions. Other indicators suggest a continuously-phonetic mechanism in vowel elisions in both language disorders and are therefore supporting theories of Cognitive Neuroscience and Neurophonetics and their underlying assumptions.