Categorical perception of lexical tones in Chinese people with post-stroke aphasia

ABSTRACT

This study used the categorical perception (CP) paradigm, a fine-grained perceptual method, to investigate the perceptual performance of lexical tones in Chinese people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA). Twenty patients with post-stroke aphasia (10 Broca’s and 10 Wernicke’s) and ten neurologically intact age-matched control participants were recruited to complete both identification and discrimination tasks of the Mandarin Tone 1–2 continuum. In addition, all participants completed tests on their auditory comprehension ability and working memory. The results showed that both Broca’s and Wernicke’s patients exhibited reduced sensitivity to within-category and between-category information but preserved CP of lexical tones. The degree of CP of lexical tones related to working memory in aphasic patients. Furthermore, lower-level acoustic processing underpinned higher-level phonological processing on the CP of lexical tones since both patient groups’ unbalanced pitch processing ability extended to their CP of lexical tones. These findings are significant for researchers and clinicians in speech-language rehabilitation, clinical psychology, and cognitive communication.

KEYWORDS:

• CP
• lexical tones
• Mandarin chinese
• post-stroke aphasia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province [2021JJ30446]; Shanghai Philosophy and Social Science Planning Office, China [2021BYY012]; Philosophy and Social Science Foundation of Hunan Province [20YBA163]; the Provincial Education Department of Hunan, China [20A303].