Garrido Lúcia, Eisner Frank, McGettigan Carolyn, Stewart Lauren, Sauter Disa, Hanley J Richard, Schweinberger Stefan R, Warren Jason D, Duchaine Brad
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK.
Neuropsychologia. 2009 Jan;47(1):123-31. doi: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.08.003. Epub 2008 Aug 13.
Phonagnosia, the inability to recognize familiar voices, has been studied in brain-damaged patients but no cases due to developmental problems have been reported. Here we describe the case of KH, a 60-year-old active professional woman who reports that she has always experienced severe voice recognition difficulties. Her hearing abilities are normal, and an MRI scan showed no evidence of brain damage in regions associated with voice or auditory perception. To better understand her condition and to assess models of voice and high-level auditory processing, we tested KH on behavioural tasks measuring voice recognition, recognition of vocal emotions, face recognition, speech perception, and processing of environmental sounds and music. KH was impaired on tasks requiring the recognition of famous voices and the learning and recognition of new voices. In contrast, she performed well on nearly all other tasks. Her case is the first report of developmental phonagnosia, and the results suggest that the recognition of a speaker's vocal identity depends on separable mechanisms from those used to recognize other information from the voice or non-vocal auditory stimuli.
声音失认症，即无法识别熟悉声音的病症，此前已在脑损伤患者中进行过研究，但尚未有因发育问题导致该病症的病例报道。在此，我们描述了KH的病例，她是一位60岁活跃的职业女性，自述一直存在严重的语音识别困难。她的听力正常，核磁共振成像扫描显示，与语音或听觉感知相关的脑区没有损伤迹象。为了更好地了解她的病情并评估语音和高级听觉处理模型，我们让KH完成了一系列行为任务，包括测量语音识别、声音情感识别、面部识别、言语感知以及环境声音和音乐处理能力。KH在识别著名声音以及学习和识别新声音的任务中表现受损。相比之下，她在几乎所有其他任务中表现良好。她的病例是发育性声音失认症的首例报道，研究结果表明，识别说话者的声音身份依赖于与从声音或非语音听觉刺激中识别其他信息所使用的机制不同的机制。
