Linguistics Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Linguistics - Essay Example How do word-deaf patients cope and how they understand and comprehend important ideas and concepts. â€Å"Pure word deafness (PWD) is a rare auditory disorder that is characterized by a selective deficit in comprehending spoken words, while the identification of nonverbal sounds remains intact.† (Zhu, et al., 2010, p. 843). This is a form of brain damage that makes it challenging for a person to comprehend words that are spoken to him or her. Pure word deafness is characterised by a selective problem of accessing language sound patterns and word forms (Rickheit & Strohne, 2012). This means that the sound patterns and variety of words presented to a person suffering from this condition are not understood by such an individual. This is distinguished from cortical auditory deficit by the fact that pure word deaf persons can hear and comprehend music and environmental sounds (Kaga, 2013). Thus, by implication, pure word deaf patients can hear and understand music as well as environmental sounds around them. However, they cannot hear words spoken to them by a third party. Pure deafness is scientifically known as Auditory Agnosia for speech and verbal communication (Feinberg & Farah, 2012). This expresses the difference and inconsistency in comprehension of verbal discourse and the lack thereof of verbal auditory recognition. â€Å"The underlying problem of a person with word-sound deafness is at the stage of extracting the phonetic features from the speech input such that the patient has problems discriminating between widely variant words (the severe form) or between similar sounding words† (Ingram, 2014, p. 166). This means that the person with word deafness has some challenges in decoding the phonetic and sound elements of speech and cannot sort it out for onward interpretation and understanding. Pure Word Deafness is caused by a brainstem lesion which is a complication that often comes with