Revisiting the relation between speech production and speech perception: Further comments on Skipper et al.

Continuing the "discussion" ofSkipper, Devlin, and Lametti's (SDL) recent and in my opinion badly misguided review of the relation between speech perception and production, let's consider this quote on page 84:Miceli, Gainotti, Caltagirone, and Masullo (1980)found a strong relationship between the ability to produce speech and discriminate syllables in 69 fluent and nonfluent aphasics. Specifically, contrasts between groups with and without a phonemic output disorder showed that patients with a disorder were worse at discriminating phonemes, particularly but not limited to those distinguished by place of articulationThis is misleading. "Ability to produce speech" in this paper is defined basically as a presence of phonemic paraphasias in the absence of articulatory difficulty, which will tend to identify fluent aphasics with posterior lesions like Wernicke's and conduction aphasia. This is a rather odd measure of "ability to produce speech" but nonetheless the article reports that patients with "phonemic output disorder" (POV+) so defined were compared with those without (POV-) on a syllable discrimination task and the POV+ group performed worse, which is what SDL note and call a "strong relationship." However, when Miceli et al. dug deeper to ask whether there was a correlation between severity of POV+ and severity of syllable discrimination deficit, no relation was observed. More importantly, Miceli et al. go on to report dissociation...
Source: Talking Brains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Source Type: blogs