Comparison of Auditory Perception between Normal Adults and Aphasic Patients

Abstract

This investigation was undertaken to compare the auditory perception of aphasic individuals with that of normal adults by performing specific auditory discrimination tasks.Two groups of subjects were asked to listen to various interrupted pure tones and to judge whether they were continuous or interrupted tones. The test tones were consisted of three pure tones with duration time 100msec and pause time 10, 30, 50msec respectively.Most nonaphasics judged the pure tones with pause time 10msec as continuous tone and them with pause time 30 or 50msec as interrupted tone. However, aphasics performed three tasks less accurately than nonaphasics. It revealed that the more disturbed the auditory comprehension of aphasics, the poorer ability in discrimination.As for aging, the auditory discrimination decreased relatively and gradually until 70 years old, and there was a dramatic decrease in both normal adults and aphasics above 70 years of age. There were no differences in discrimination ability between males and females.