A neurophonetic approach to articulation planning: The case of apraxia of speech

Abstract

This article addresses the question of whether data from neurological populations can inform basic phonetic research. An approach is reviewed in which speech error data from patients with articulation disorders after a stroke were used to model articulation planning processes.The first section addresses a controversy in cognitive neuroscience about the extent to which data from neurological patients can enrich research in cognitive science at all. It introduces post-stroke apraxia of speech (AOS) as a clinical model of a process termed speech motor planning, suggesting that speech data from patients with AOS can inform phonetic theories about articulatory control.The second section explains how speech error data from patients with AOS were used to develop a measure of articulatory ease that integrates facilitating and complicating factors across different phonological levels, from the articulatory gesture to the phonological word.Section 3 presents previously unpublished data to exemplify how this model can be applied to typical speech, e.g., in studies investigating interactions between lexical and articulatory parameters or in developmental studies of word learning. In a final section, the main line of reasoning is summarized and limitations of this work are discussed.