10. Language and Hearing
1 - Essential developmental task
2 - Decoding auditory signals
3 - Motor aphasia
4 - Sensory aphasia
5 - Word deafness
Language evolved with elaboration of association tracts in the cerebral cortex.
However, language is normally learned through the sense of hearing and before
maturation of the cortical language circuits. Children with autism often develop
"echolalic speech," in which sentence fragments remembered from earlier contexts are
used without rephrasing in new contexts. Echolalic speech reflects failure to extract
features such as syllable and word boundaries from rapidly spoken streams of
speech. Rapin (1997) has referred to this disability as “verbal auditory agnosia,” and
it may be the result of impaired function in auditory nuclei like the inferior colliculus.
Neurologic
Impairments
References
Notes
Index
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