Purpose: The StartReact effect, whereby movements are elicited by loud, startling acoustic stimuli (SAS), allows the evaluation of movements when initiated through involuntary circuitry, before auditory feedback. When StartReact is applied during poststroke upper extremity movements, individuals exhibit increased muscle recruitment, reaction…

Background: Imprecise articulation has a negative impact on speech intelligibility. Therefore, treatment of articulation is clinically relevant in patients with dysarthria. In order to be effective and according to the principles of motor learning, articulation therapy needs to be intensive, well organized, with adequate feedback and requires…

Purpose: Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and accompanying analytical methods are shown to capture and quantify salient aspects of apraxic speech, substantiating and expanding upon evidence provided by clinical observation and acoustic and kinematic data. Analysis of apraxic speech errors within a dynamic systems framework is provided…

Purpose: Early apraxia of speech (AOS) research has characterized errors as being variable, resulting in a number of different error types being produced on repeated productions of the same stimuli. Conversely, recent research has uncovered greater consistency in errors, but there are limited data examining sound errors over time (more than one…

Literature suggests that illiterate subjects are unaware of the phonological structure of language. This fact may influence the characteristics of aphasic speech, namely the structure of paraphasias. A battery of tests was developed for this study to be used with aphasic subjects (literate and illiterate), in order to explore this topic in more…

The current study aimed to provide a comprehensive analysis of linguopalatal contact patterns in participants with acquired apraxia of speech (AOS). Tongue-to-palate contacts were recorded for three participants with AOS during consonant singletons and consonant clusters using the Reading Electropalatograph (EPG3) system. Amount and pattern of…

Two studies of adult aphasia, focusing on phonological disturbances, are presented. In the first study, subjects were 15 adults wit moderate aphasia and five age-matched controls. A variety of speech production and speech perception tests were administered, including tests of syllable discrimination, auditive word-picture matching, articulation,…