Untersuchung zur Stimmerkennung bei aphasischen und nicht-aphasischen Patienten

Introduction: Identification of people known to us is essential in our social life. We can identify familiar people by their faces as well as by their voices. Our ability to recognise speakers by their voice is certainly manifest in a lot of everyday situations. We can easily identify our partner speaking in another room or the voice of our neighbour sitting behind his hedge. Previous (fMRI-, PET-) studies suggest that impairment of voice recognition can be caused by damage to the parietal as well as the temporal regions of the right hemisphere. The objective of our current study is to determine the performance of left brain damaged (LBD, aphasic) and right brain damaged (RBD, non-aphasic) patients in a voice recognition task. Subjects: A group of 20 patients from the departments of neuropsychological rehabilitation at various clinics in Bielefeld and Bad Oeynhausen (Germany) participated. The criterion for inclusion was the presence of left (N = 11; 2 f / 9 m) or right sided (N = 9; 3 f / 6 m) brain damage caused by ischaemic infarct as confirmed by clinical investigation (LBD mean age 66.3 years [SD = 7.7] and RBD mean age 64.1 years [SD = 11.1]). The mean post onset time was 2.4 months (SD = 2.8). 17 healthy controls participated in this study. 9 were female and 8 were male and their mean age was 64.1 (SD = 5.2). All participants were right-handed and native speaking Germans. Patients with bilateral lesions, re-infarct, dementia, lack of concentration and/or attention, depression or partial amnesia (auditory stimuli) were excluded. Method: We recorded 10 (5 female/5 male) voice samples from unfamiliar speakers, and one voice sample from the wife/husband of the participant. After creating 8 different tasks with 4 different types of stimuli (2 vowels, 2 CVC cluster, 2 words, 2 sentences) we presented them to the participant (1 familiar + 5 unfamiliar [male or female] voice samples = 6 voice samples / task). Results: We could prove a significantly impaired speaker recognition in RBD patients. All subjects enhanced their performance with increasing stimulus duration.

Level thesis:degree_level

thesis.doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher

Universität Bielefeld

Year

2006

Author dc:creator

• Kneidl, Oliver

Repository record source_url

https://pub.uni-bielefeld.de/record/2302340

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:pub.uni-bielefeld.de:2302340