Recent neuroimaging studies proposed the importance of the anterior auditory pathway for speech comprehension. Its clinical significance is implicated by semantic dementia or pure word deafness. Neurodegenerative or cerebrovascular nature, however, precluded precise localization of the cortex responsible for speech perception. Electrical cortical stimulation could delineate such localization by...

OBJECTIVE The current study investigated performance on a dual auditory task during a simulated night shift. BACKGROUND Night shifts and sleep deprivation negatively affect performance on vigilance-based tasks, but less is known about the effects on complex tasks. Because language processing is necessary for successful work performance, it is important to understand how it is affected by nigh...

Task difficulty is a critical issue affecting test developers. Controlling or balancing the item difficulty of an assessment improves its validity and discrimination. Test developers construct tests from the cognitive perspective, by making the test constructing process more scientific and efficient; thus, the scores obtained more precisely represent the proficiency level. In this paper, a fram...

It has been proposed that internal simulation of the talking face of visually-known speakers facilitates auditory speech recognition. One prediction of this view is that brain areas involved in auditory-only speech comprehension interact with visual face-movement sensitive areas, even under auditory-only listening conditions. Here, we test this hypothesis using connectivity analyses of function...

In this study, the linguistic performance of 20 patients with acute conduction aphasia (CA) is described. CA presented as a relatively homogeneous aphasic syndrome characterized by a severe impairment of repetition and fluent expressive language functions with frequent phonemic paraphasias, repetitive self-corrections, word-finding difficulties, and paraphrasing. Language comprehension as asses...

We report the case of patient M, who suffered unilateral left posterior temporal and parietal damage, brain regions typically associated with language processing. Language function largely recovered since the infarct, with no measurable speech comprehension impairments. However, the patient exhibited a severe impairment in nonverbal auditory comprehension. We carried out extensive audiological ...

Neuroimaging studies have shown that speech comprehension involves a number of widely distributed regions within the frontal and temporal lobes. We aimed to examine the differential contributions of white matter connectivity to auditory word and sentence comprehension in chronic post-stroke aphasia. Structural and diffusion MRI data were acquired on 40 patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia....

The ability of the auditory system to change the perceptual weighting of acoustic cues when faced with degraded speech has long been evidenced. However, the exact changes that occur remain mostly unknown. Here, we proposed to use the Auditory Classification Image (ACI) methodology to reveal the acoustic cues used in natural speech comprehension and in reduced (i.e. noise-vocoded or re-synthesiz...

Delays of auditory perception at three frequencies were measured in 30 multiple sclerosis patients using a psychophysical technique. Nineteen patients had abnormal delays at one or more tone frequencies, though 15 had normal audiograms at those frequencies. In addition, auditory acuity for left-right asynchrony was abnormally poor in 13 patients, 9 of whom had normal audiograms. Such delays of ...