Figure 1.

The representation + noise model. Patients were presented with 150 successive trials consisting of pairs of manipulated prosodies (A) and asked to judge, within each pair, which sounded most interrogative (B). Patient responses in each trial were fitted with a 2-stage psychophysical model (C), consisting, first, of a prosodic template (or “internal representation”) to which sound stimuli are compared and, second, of a level of “internal noise” which controls how consistently this representation is applied to incoming stimuli. See main text for details about the model-fitting procedure. In this work, we estimate the two model parameters (representation and noise) for each patient individually and compare them with patient records to test their value as markers of receptive aprosodia.