Blackwell Reference Online

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Neurophonetics deals with neurogenic impairments of the motor act of speaking and of the perceptual processes of spoken language understanding, with the aim of unraveling the neural organization of speech motor control and speech perception. To the extent that phonetics is a subdiscipline of linguistics, neurophonetics can be viewed as a subdiscipline of neurolinguistics. In this view, the field focuses on the ‘front-ends’ of the neural apparatus devoted to spoken language processing, neglecting the more central issues of lexical, syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic processing. The notoriously difficult problem of drawing a clear taxonomic line between phonetics and phonology also extends to neurophonetics. It will be shown later in this chapter that the distinction between phonological encoding, phonetic encoding, and speech motor execution is among the most controversial issues in the understanding of neurogenic speech disorders.Neurophoneric research is in large part based on classical phonetic methodologies, such as instrumental assessment of the dynamics and kinematics of impaired speech movements, measurement of the aerodynamic and the acoustic events resulting from such movements, auditory analyses of the utterances of impaired speakers, or perceptual experiments taxing the auditory speech processing capabilities of patients with brain lesions (see chapter 19, chapter 20, chapter ... log in or subscribe to read full text