ABSTRACT

Background

Suprasegmental features are often affected by brain damage, and are typically accompanied by motor speech disorders such as dysarthria, apraxia of speech (AOS), and foreign accent syndrome (FAS). However, there is no report of a selective pitch accent disorder without motor speech impairments or FAS.

Aims

We describe a female Japanese patient who developed a selective pitch accent disorder without motor speech impairments or FAS, with accompanying mild Wernicke’s aphasia due to head injury, in order to investigate the mechanism of pitch accent disorder based on speech production models.

Methods & Procedures

We analysed her spontaneous speech, confrontation naming, repetition, reading aloud, and the error patterns in her pitch accents in two sessions. Additionally, we gave her a reading aloud test of homonyms with different accent patterns and an auditory discrimination task of pitch accents.

Outcomes & Results

The patient exhibited a significant recovery from aphasia, and paraphasia was observed to almost disappear, although the pitch accent errors remained in all speech modalities. While she was able to auditorily distinguish between correct and incorrect pitch accents, she was unaware of her own abnormally accented speech. The results of the analysis of the error patterns in her pitch accents revealed that they, even if incorrect for the selected words, did not actually deviate from the correct patterns in the Osaka dialect, her native dialect.

Conclusions

Our observations suggest that the process of pitch accent production may be independent of that of phoneme production. Moreover, it may be that her accent abnormalities were not produced randomly during the process of articulation, but instead may have been due to a problem in selecting pitch accent patterns from the repertoire of Osaka accent patterns allocated to the corresponding words. This suggests that the patient’s pitch accent disorder was a problem in a higher level of linguistic processing, i.e., lexical pitch accent encoding, rather than the motor control of speech production.

中文翻译：

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在一名日本患者中观察到因颅脑外伤导致的音调重音障碍

摘要

背景

超节段特征经常受到脑损伤的影响，并且通常伴有运动性言语障碍，例如构音障碍、言语失用 (AOS) 和外国口音综合征 (FAS)。然而，没有关于没有运动语言障碍或 FAS 的选择性音高口音障碍的报道。

目标

我们描述了一名日本女性患者，她出现了一种没有运动语言障碍或 FAS 的选择性音调重音障碍，并伴有由于头部受伤导致的轻度 Wernicke 失语症，以基于语音产生模型研究音调重音障碍的机制。

方法和程序

我们在两次会议中分析了她的自发演讲、对抗命名、重复、大声朗读以及她的音调口音中的错误模式。此外，我们还对她进行了具有不同口音模式的同音异义词的朗读测试和音高口音的听觉辨别任务。

结果和结果

患者表现出从失语症中显着恢复，并且观察到失语症几乎消失，尽管音高重音错误仍然存​​在于所有语音方式中。虽然她能够在听觉上区分正确和不正确的口音，但她并没有意识到自己的口音异常。对她的音调中的错误模式进行分析的结果表明，即使选择的单词不正确，它们实际上并没有偏离她的母语大阪方言中的正确模式。

结论

我们的观察表明，音高重音产生的过程可能独立于音素产生的过程。此外，她的口音异常可能不是在发音过程中随机产生的，而是可能是由于从分配给相应单词的大阪口音模式的曲目中选择音高重音模式的问题。这表明患者的音高重音障碍是更高水平的语言处理问题，即词汇音高重音编码，而不是语音产生的运动控制。