Humans imitate each other during social interaction. This imitative behavior streamlines social interaction and aids in learning to replicate actions. However, the effect of imitation on action comprehension is unclear. This study investigated whether vocal imitation of an unfamiliar accent improved spoken-language comprehension. Following a pretraining accent comprehension test, participants w...

This investigation examined how age and test condition affect one's ability to comprehend discourse passages, and determined whether age and test condition affect discourse comprehension and closed-set sentence recognition in a similar way. Young and older adults were tested with closed-set sentences from the newly-created build-a-sentence test (BAS) and a series of discourse passages in two au...

INTRODUCTION Aphasia is one of the most disabling sequelae after stroke, occurring in 25%-40% of stroke survivors. However, there remains a lack of good evidence for the efficacy or mechanisms of speech comprehension rehabilitation. TRIAL DESIGN This within-subjects trial tested two concurrent interventions in 20 patients with chronic aphasia with speech comprehension impairment following lef...

She was reportedly studying Spanish as a second language. A full neurological workup and a detailed speech-language assessment were conducted. Neurological examination revealed a conscious alert lady with intact power in all 4 extremities, grade 5/5 (Medical Research Council grade) and down going plantars. There were no sensory deficits, and cortical sensations were intact. Visual fields could ...

Children and adolescents with Down syndrome show an emerging profile of speech and language characteristics that is typical of the syndrome (Chapman & Hesketh, 2000; Chapman, 2003; Abbeduto & Chapman, 2005) and different from typically developing children matched for nonverbal mental age, including expressive language deficits relative to comprehension that are most severe for syntax, and, in a...

In a seminal article, Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard & Sedivy (1995) showed that eye-movements to real-world objects reflect a rapid interplay of utterance and visual environments in sentence comprehension. Further, Kamide, Scheepers & Altmann (2003) found that when linguistic and world knowledge constrain the domain of reference in a visual scene, people even anticipate as yet unmentione...

A patient is described with a 5 year progressive defect of naming and auditory verbal comprehension, the pathological nature of which was presumably degenerative. The auditory comprehension defect unevenly affected different semantic categories, and was particularly severe for the names of animals, fruits and vegetables. The patients showed loss of the verbal knowledge of the physical attribute...

Spoken language comprehension requires the coordination of different subprocesses in time. After the initial acoustic analysis the system has to extract segmental information such as phonemes, syntactic elements and lexical-semantic elements as well as suprasegmental information such as accentuation and intonational phrases, i.e., prosody. According to the dynamic dual pathway model of auditory...

Motor theories of speech perception have been re-vitalized as a consequence of the discovery of mirror neurons. Some authors have even promoted a strong version of the motor theory, arguing that the motor speech system is critical for perception. Part of the evidence that is cited in favor of this claim is the observation from the early 1980s that individuals with Broca's aphasia, and therefore...