Velar movements during speech in two Wernicke aphasic patients

The articulatory gestures of the velum in two Wernicke aphasic patients were examined to compare their performances with those of an apraxic patient by means of the fiberoptic technique. In contrast to the marked variability in the apraxic performance in terms of velum height and segmental duration, the two fluent aphasic subjects showed a relatively high degree of consistency in velar movements throughout several repetitions of nonsense syllables and meaningful words. In addition, both patients exhibited a normal pattern of anticipatory coarticulation. Analyses of the velar movement patterns during the speech-sound error processes of both patients suggested that these errors were not due to an impairment at the level of articulatory programming but to an error in the selection of a target phoneme.