The Relative Ability of Aphasic Persons to Judge the Duration and Intensity of Pure Tones

Abstract
This investigation was undertaken to determine the relative ability of aphasic individuals to perform specific sensory discrimination tasks. The study sought to determine if aphasics differ from nonaphasics in their abilities to judge aural tasks involving (1) temporal discrimination and (2) intensity discrimination. The two groups of adult experimental subjects listened to two series of pairs of pure tones. The first series of 20 pairs was judged on the basis of temporal variations and the second series on the basis of variations in the relative intensity. Three statistical methods were used to analyze the data. First, the total number of times each subject judged the variable member of each pair to be longer (or louder) was determined. These values were then plotted on two graphs using the Method of Least Squares to obtain linear functions. Additionally, the difference limen and the t-test for independent means were applied to the data. All three statistical methods revealed that aphasics performed less accurately than did nonaphasics on sensory discrimination tasks.